STONE ARABIA by Dana Spiotta (is my Boyfriend)

I got so many good books for Christmas this past year, you guys.

In addition to a massive amount of Jennifer Egan novels, also received Amy Waldman’s  THE SUBMISSION, Eleanor Henderson’s TEN THOUSAND SAINTS, and of course, today’s Book Boyfriend STONE ARABIA. It’s nigh on March and I am still reaping the benefits of my Christmas Books Pirate Booty.

Whenever I get the blues or the mean reds, I just need to remind myself that I am a person who received SO MANY good books for Christmas this past year. If you received good books for Christmas, you need to remind yourself of this on a regular basis too.

There were so many things I liked about this book. I dug that it was a Los Angeles novel, I was super into the rock-and-rolliness of this work, I was all about it being a piece centered around the lives of f’d up siblings, the idea of a person privately falsifying their entire career/personal history was so spooky and wonderful…

I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s make like a Synopsis Gadget and get this book synopsized.

Set in the middle of this past decade, Stone Arabia is told in so many different persons: third person (CD liner notes, obituaries, regular old prose) ,  epistolary (letters, diary entries) first person,  plain-Jane first person, I think that’s all the persons in this book, but correct me if I’m wrong. The first person(s) are the voice of Denise, a 47 year old Los Angeles native in freefall. Her mother is suffering from dementia, she’s carrying on vaguely unhealthy sexcapades with pseudo-boyfriend Jay, she’s a couple inches away from being estranged from her daughter Ada, and then there is the significant and consuming problem of her brother Nik, a musician who has spent his life, seeming intentionally, on the periphery of success, health, and just being able to basically function. Nik is the author of a decades-long project “The Chronicles,” where he has fictionalized much of his career/life in the form of falsified reviews, fake interviews, even fictional bootleg album covers. Denise narrates from the present, and mixing in her own troubling past and uncertain present with the current events of the mid-aughts, tells the story of the rapid and wobbling decline of her already-teetering-on-the-edge-of-dark-and-irrevocable-actions brother.

It took me a few tries to get into this book, the opening chapters are engaging, but slightly obtuse. That said, once I was in it, I was in it to win it. The Kranises are a singular family, and Nik and Denis are a mesmerizing and unsettling brother-sister pairing. The dermis and underbelly of Los Angeles play a significant role in this book, it’s a great setting for this story that pits reality against fantasy with no clear victor.

I’m just going to come out and say it: reading this book made me feel cool. It was an intellectually engaging read and emotionally compelling read, yes and yes, true and true, but it was also just a futhermucking cool read. Like if I was going to the bachelorette party of a cool girl who always wore weird jewelry and made it work and was like a window dresser for Anthropologie/bass player of an all girl garage rock-pop band, and I wanted to give her a present that wasn’t just another weirdly-shaped vibrator, I’d get her this book. I mean, it’s a bridal shower, that’s big, I’d probably also pair it with Emma Straub’s OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED and Elissa Schappell’s BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS, and tie the package up with like, a skull-print ribbon. And I would wear a ballerina dress with Converse hi-tops and be the coolest kid around.

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE:

A nuts-talented crazy boy. Not crazy like Fox Searchlight quirky crazy. Crazy like A BEAUTIFUL MIND had a crazy baby with ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and GIRL INTERRUPTED and BELL JAR take turns babysitting crazy. But he’s like this whoa-crazy successful musician! Acknowledging the fact that this success is a massive delusion, but are you dating a musician who is EVEN delusionally successful. That’s what I thought, point, set, match, me!

MY DATE WITH STONE ARABIA:

He plays me his sexy rock star jams. Let’s take that back. Sexxxxxxxxxy with eight x’s. Better.

I find out he’s not so much a rock god as a fully off-his-rocker  rock fraud.

And now I’m alone with him in my house. POOR LIFE CHOICES.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Schriver (is my Boyfriend)

Happy Valentines Day, Pals and Pallerinas! I thought it would be fun to celebrate this day of love and affection by sharing with you the f-ing creepiest book I have ever read in the history of my life:

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Schriver

(Cue creepy silent movie organ accompaniment.)

So I’ve been using a micro-mini shorthand Synopsis Gadget when rec-ing this book in person to people.

“It’s like Rosemary’s Baby all grown up,” has been my party line.

But this is my fancy and important book blog, so I’ll give you guys a real plot-hook-up. Let’s do it, to it. Eva Katchadourian, liberal-minded world traveller and pioneer of a Lonely Planet-like travel book series, isn’t sure she wants to be a mother. Still, she takes the plunge with her conservative and proud-to-be-an-American husband Franklin, and the result is Kevin, a child that seems like Rosemary’s Baby from the day he is brought home from the hospital. As Kevin grows, he increasingly demonstrates signs of being a sociopath. Eva sees all, Frank chooses to ignore and explain away Kevin’s disturbing behavior, a split that causes a serious rift in their relationship. As Kevin goes from elementary to middle to high school, acts of malice grow into acts of outright violence and climax in one act of terror, a malevolent plot that takes the lives of several of his high school’s brightest stars. The book  is epistolary (one of my FAVORITE devices in prose, if you don’t know how to write that Great American Novel stuck inside your brain, try it in letters, I will support you in this mission.) Eva writes letters to Frank in the present, after Kevin’s attack on his classmates, and we come to understand the terms of their estrangement, as well as the events of the last fifteen years, over the course of the book.

I listened to this book on audio and I found it Harry-Potter-absorbing. No joke, I would be sitting in my driveway a half hour after parking still listening to this sucker on my iPhone, and my Human Boyfriend would knock on the driver’s window and ask if I was going to come inside and I would snap back ” I’m just looking for a good stopping place, stop looking at me like I’m crazy for sitting in my car for this long after getting home, I’ll be right in!” There really isn’t a good stopping place with this one. Towards the middle, it gets ALMOST repetitive, Kevin’s acts of evil sort of plateau out a bit, but the book quickly regains its footing and the ending is the literary equivalent of a fireworks display. The last fifty pages practically made me pass out. It’s been a few week since I read this book and I still think about it every single day. I’m not sure if I’m a Lionel Schriver fan, I tried to listen to So Much For That  on audiobook and only got about two hours in before putting it aside, maybe for a while, maybe forever. I’m not sure if I’m a Schriver fan but I am 110% a We Need to Talk About Kevin fan, don’t talk to me about how “that’s not math.” It’s emotional math. This book unravelled  me.

I have book friends who won’t read this book. Some claim faint-heartedness, some plead the “I have babies and this book is going to make me too afraid that they’re going to grow up to be a Zodiac Killer or Unabomber.” These are valid reasons not to read this book. Any reason is a valid reason not to read a book. This isn’t that Twilight Zone episode where the bookworm gets stuck in a library in the wake of an apocalypse and thinks he has all the time in the world to read. You don’t have time, you have to be discerning about what you pick up. And if you want something pleasant or affirming, this is the last paperback you want to slide your Visa card through for. I mean, this book chilled my bones so hard it turned my skeleton into Antarctica. However, if you are looking for a work that is equal parts mesmerizing and shattering, go to your local bookstore, go to the library, get on Powells or Indiebound, get this did.

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE:

A teenage sociopath, this was such a bad idea.

MY DATE WITH “WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN”:

I realize my teenage boyfriend is a sociopath.

And all of a sudden he has a twelve inch knife right beside him.

F—.

A GOOD AMERICAN by ALEX GEORGE (is my Book Boyfriend)

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT:

I read an advanced copy of this book in Africa. On busses in Kenya, at night in tents in Tanzania, and during the interminable wait at the border in between.

I think it’s possible I might be the first person to have read A Good American by Alex George in Africa. I hope so. I love firsts.

I crazy-enjoyed this book. That’s not a first on this blog. Of course, when it comes to my feelings towards the literature I read, I’m not looking for originality, just consistency.

Synopsis Gadget, let’s Radar O’Reilly these shenanigans up.

A GOOD AMERICAN tells the story of the Meisenheimers, a family with a story that begins in 1904 with a young Prussian couple breaking free of familial constraints and fleeing to America, settling in Beatrice, Missouri, and launching us, the readers, into a three-generational family saga. The Meisenheimers are musicians and the Meisenheimers are restaurant owners, which is so appropriate, as food and music carry this family through their troubles, of which (this being a great novel and all) they have more than their fair share. There’s war, there’s untimely death, there’s bankruptcy, there’s most of the 20th century. It’s a lot for family to handle. But f— it if they don’t handle it.

There is a tall-tale-like, fable-y quality to this book. Nothing is actually-in-fact wizards-and-wands-magic, but so many of the small stories that made up this patchwork quilt of a saga felt like they were sprinkled with the tiniest pinch of fairy dust, especially the stories of the first two generations. I think this must be because of the sense of possibility pulsating through so much of the book, first and second generation Americans who still so fervently believe in that so-hard-to-define-but-so-easy-to-love American Dream. It felt like a North American One Hundred Years of Solitude. It felt like a literary Amelie, or a historical Big Fish.  The last third of the book felt much more in the vein of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. Troubles catch up with the family. Secrets are revealed. The fairy dust finds its way under the cracks of the floorboards. The American Dream is revealed to be exactly that, a dream. It’s heartbreaking and it’s necessary.

I intensely enjoyed this book. I can’t remember the last time I read a story that explored the American identity with such originality, honesty, and compassion. If you want to get lost in a big old fashioned (and somehow, at the same time, new fashioned) yarn, this is your jam.

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE:

He wears suspenders and a bow tie, he brought me flowers, played me his fiddle, and made me crawfish etouffe. I’m down! He also wants us to have six kids, and plans on getting into a bunch of Forrest-Gump-like shenanigans that are going to include both world wars and JFK’s assassination. I’m…. less down.

MY DATE WITH A GOOD AMERICAN:

I took a Quicktime video of us playing around with my parents’ player piano. It is quick, and we certainly have a time.  We’re really in the 21st century now.

ANYA’S GHOST by VERA BROSGOL (is my GHOST BOOK GIRLFRIEND)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT:

Womb-to-tomb bibliophiles know this. Sometimes you have a Huge Stack of Books You Are Going to Read, and then a book NOT AT ALL on that pile flies at you, cuts eighteen places ahead in line, and you just plow through that cheater cheater pumpkin eater while your To Be Read stack stares reproachfully at you.

This is what happened with ANYA’S GHOST. I had four more books I was supposed to be reading,  I was visiting my parents for the day, this book was on our kitchen table, my sister said I would be all about this book. Next thing I know, I’m half-way through.

It’s appropriate that this book weirdly  and suddenly appeared in my life because the subject of the book is a Weird Thing That Suddenly Appears in the Protagonist’s Life. A GHOST.

Cue spooky music!  Cue rattling chains! Cue thunder rolling! Cue that sound effect of an otherworldly female voice going “Oooh-OOOH-Oooh.”

ANYA’S GHOST is not just a book about a ghost.

ANYA’S GHOST is a GRAPHIC NOVEL about a ghost.

ANYA’S GHOST is ALSO a graphic novel SET IN HIGH SCHOOL about a ghost.

Are we having fun yet? If you are a human being on the planet Earth and you just heard that log line, I already know the answer to my own question.

Synopsis Gadget, today you look like a Ghostbuster’s Proton Pack.

Anya is a second-gen Russian American who is having trouble at school, at home, with crushes, with friends, she’s a teenage girl, this is not a breaking news: special bulletin. When she cuts school and accidentally falls down a well, she finds herself sitting next to a skeleton AND the 90-year old teen girl ghost Emily who once WAS that skeleton. Thank the Graphic Novel Gods this book doesn’t take place entirely in that well. Anya gets out, Emily follows her home, and inserts herself in Anya’s life as a magical little ghost life helper. As with any story about magic, at first magic makes everything really, really awesome. And then it makes everything really, really the opposite of awesome.

I like graphic novels a lot a lot and this is some of the most fun I’ve had reading in the genre. The supernatural is superbly woven into the pitch-perfect slice-of-teenage-life that is Anya’s existence. The story is about self-acceptance, and thematically, it’s one of the most clever and affecting uses of this theme that I’ve seen in teen-centric stories. It’s smart without feeling like “this dialogue is written by a writer who is really afraid you won’t know he’s clever unless he puts every joke he’s ever heard into his character’s speech” and moving without ever toeing the line of sentimentality.

So that’s the writing. Okay, the art. I skew  ”a little bit better than stick figures” in the Great Human Drawing Spectrum, and feel a little silly making any kind of judgement about the art.  Still, because my sister is a cartoonist/animator, she’s taught me how to say things like “I love the linework” and “What a gorgeous layout.”

ANYA’S GHOST does have love-able linework and gorgeous-ity made layout.

I don’t read much YA (re: almost none), but for whatever reason the YA I do read is almost always Graphic Novel YA ( Craig Thompson’s BLANKETS, Marjane Satrapi’s PERSEPOLIS, Ariel Schrag’s AWKWARD and POTENTIAL, MK Reed/Jonathan Hill’s AMERCICUS, Laurie Sandell’s THE IMPOSTOR’S DAUGHTER, Allison Bechdel’s FUN HOME, and David Small’s STICHES are all primarily, if not entirely coming-of-age stories with a heavy emphasis on the teen years.)

I LIKE these books. Does this mean I would like YA with just words and no pictures (oh, also Sherman Alexie’s ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART TIME INDIAN half-counts) if I just gave the genre more of a chance?

Is all YA-without-pictures like PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER and/or LITTLE WOMEN? Because if that is the case, I will cartoon-hearts-in-my-eyes it for always.

ANYA’S GHOST, go get it from your local independent bookstore, go get it put on hold at the library, don’t even talk to me about Amazon, we can’t have that discussion.

WHAT KIND OF GIRLFRIEND IS SHE: A boring human girlfriend. No, don’t be stupid,  she’s a GHOST GIRLFRIEND.

MY DATE WITH ANYA’S GHOST-

“Hi, Ghost Girlfriend!”

“GHOST KISSES!”

THE KEEP by JENNIFER EGAN (is my Boyfriend)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT: It’s been a funny few weeks to be a book blogger. In addition to the maelstrom between authors/their reps and bloggers, which  I wrote about for Book Riot , there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not book bloggers write “reviews” or “reactions,” (I couldn’t find the link to the original post about this, if anyone wants to be an awesome-face and link-me-up-Scotty in the comments, thank you in advance.) Of course, I’m over here rolling my eyes going “Reaction, review, review, reaction, you fools, don’t you know that BOOKS ARE FOR DATING?”

Someday, they will understand. And that day will be a glorious day indeed, the people will dance, the angels will sing, and everything will look like a really pretty Renaissance painting.

In the meantime, I have the ab-fab-est of book boyfriends for you this week: Jennifer Egan’s THE KEEP.

Synopsis gadget, shake what your Mama gave you.

THE KEEP is a matryoshka doll of a book. We begin with with Danny, an approaching-mid-life white male New Yorker brand of fuck up, who travels to Eastern Europe to help his cousin Howie, a retired-at-a-nuts-young-age finances guy, with the restoration of castle he has purchased. As a child Danny played a devastating prank-that-was-basically-a-serious-crime-the-only-reason-I’m-calling-it-a-prank-is-because-that’s-what-the-Amazon-synopsis-says-it-is on Howie. While in the castle, and cut off from civilization and outside communication, Danny becomes paranoid, wondering with increasing frequency whether Howie brought Danny to this remote and isolated place to enact vengeance for the hell Danny brought down on Howie’s head twenty years earlier.

I said this book is a matryoshka doll with larger stories enveloping it, and it is, but I don’t want to say what the other dolls are in this reaction/review/discussion about my book book boyfriend du jour, because it was so thrilling for me to discover the stories that wrapped themselves around this central story, and I don’t want to take those thrills away from you, I like you guys too much!

What I will say is that everything storyline in this novel is thematically in sync. What happens to the human mind in strict isolation. How guilt can follow us through our lives like cops chasing a perp through mid-speed traffic. The inability to trust your own thoughts and the tightrope act of trusting others. All wrapped up in a big modern-day gothic package with Jane Eyre wrapping paper and a Tim Burton bow.

We who love literary fiction usually do not want to read Shitty Paperback Mysteries. But we still want a mystery every once in a while, we want a book that makes us feel like we are on a very-very-high floor of the Empire State Building, leaning forward, faces pressed against, the glass, looking a thousand feet down. We want those thrills, but, you know, literary-style-like.

THE KEEP is the ace-in-the-hole answer to this problem. Kazam!

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE- A smart fuck-up. I was attracted to the smarts, the fucked-upness even more. He wanted me to go visit this castle with him. Then things got super-F’d.

MY DATE WITH “THE KEEP”:

He wanders around this little garden outside the castle. He is ranting…

And raving…

And more ranting and raving and also some mouth-frothing…

And then he falls into the algae-mud-gross fountain water…

THE SUBMISSION by Amy Waldman (is my Boyfriend)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT-

This book made me climbing-up-the-wall-and-ripping-fistfuls-of-hair-out-of-my-scalp-eyes-glowing-red-and-froth-coming-out-of-my-mouth furious, and I mean this in the best possible way. It’s almost impossible to remember the last time a book pissed me off this much and pissed me off so brilliantly at that.

Let’s Synopsis Gadget this sucker. Because this book made me so furious, this time around the Synopsis Gadget is a bazooka gun the size of a pirate ship cannon that shoots out great white sharks and laser death rays.

THE SUBMISSION takes place in New York City two years after 9-11. There is a blind submission competition to design the 9-11 memorial , and when the winner is revealed to be a Muslim American the Piñata from Hell breaks open and all manner of fucked-up-ness rains down upon the city. The story starts with the scandal of the winner’s name being leaked and the subsequent fallout. The plot then follows the ripples the scandal creates in the already stretched-past-its-breaking-point-city-of-New-York, and those ripples set a series of nightmarish events into motion.  The book is BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES-ish in scope, following several disparate characters, a wealthy white woman and a Bangladeshi immigrant who cannot speak English, both 9-11 widows, an ambitious journalist who is basically the most f’d up possible version of Carrie Bradshaw, an angry young man in charge of a grassroots counter-movement that soon slips out of his control, a stay-at-home-Mom turned Ann Coulter-esque rabble rouser, the list of magnetic and repulsive characters goes on. And of course, at the center of it all is Mohammed Khan, the architect himself.

The book has received significant praise.  In 2011 it was Esquire’s Book of the Year, Barnes and Nobles Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly’s Favorite Book of the Year, on NPR’s 10 Best Novels of 2011, and it was a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. It’s not enough. THE SUBMISSION should have received scads more attention than it did. It by no means slipped under the radar. Still it absolutely should have received the debut attention of ART OF FIELDING and TIGER’S WIFE. The writing is that singular. The knot this story leaves in your chest after you turn the last page takes that long to untie itself.

If I could make all 300 million people in America read two books (I’m working on a plan, it involves extraterrestrial technology and Haitian voodoo magic) it would be this book and COLUMBINE by David Cullen. I wouldn’t read both back to back unless you have bones made of titanium steel. But, since I don’t have the Caribbean spells and flying saucers together quite yet I just have to ask you very nicely, please read THE SUBMISSION. Please, please, please.

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE- I really thought this was going to work out. He’s an architect and I’m a bloggerina, it’s like we’re a romantic comedy in real life. He’s Muslim, I’m quasi-Jew-y, all our NPR-listening liberal-faced friends approved. And he’s got that sexified Middle Eastern thing going on where he’s super tan and has a black beard but also has these greeny-amazing eyes. This was really going to work.  Then he got embroiled in a national scandal and got super emo on me. IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING, AM I RIGHT LADIES?

MY DATE WITH THE SUBMISSION-

He’s been so pissed and grouchy lately I thought it would be cute and fun to play Lincoln logs with my architect boyfriend.

He just spends all the time on the phone with his lawyer.

I play with Lincoln logs by myself and predictably do not do a very good job building “The Camp Cabin.”

BORN TO RUN: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall (is my Boyfriend)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT:

Like so many people that love to read, I also love to sit. And lay down. On my back, stomach, side, and tilty-in-between places. Spoon and be spooned. Beds are my favorite furniture, and couches are my almost-favorite-but-definitely-second-favorite furniture. So it takes some book to hoist me up on my feet. And it REALLY takes some book to compel me to lace up my sneakers and race around the local track until I’m breathing like I was just pulled under by a riptide for two minutes and sweating like I am a character from Oregon Trail and we had to stop the wagon because I have both cholera and diptheria.

Synopsis Gadget, my Gollum-and-the-ring-precious Synopsis Gadget, my Synopsis Gadget that I love as much as Tin Tin loves his human-brained puppy dog and Doctor Who loves his laser screwdriver, Synopsis Gadget, let’s do this thing.

Prompted by a foot injury that gets him thinking about human beings and their physical capabilities, journalist Christopher McDougall sets off to Mexico, traveling through North America’s most inhospitable terrain in search of a legendary tribe of long distance runners who are rumored to be able to race a hundred miles in three days. The thing is, McDougall actually finds this tribe, the Tarahumara. The other thing is, everything he’s heard about them is true. This launches McDougall straight into a journey of most epic proportions, a journey that causes him to ask questions about history and the human body that all leads our author-hero to one nine-point-five-on-the-Richter-Scale-earthshaking-epiphany: What the Tarahumara can do, McDougall can do too. In fact, all of us can.

No, it’s true, our bodies are built to run A HUNDRED MILES AT A TIME. And we’re also built to run if not faster, than longer than antelopes and cheetah and like, basically everything. We’re all superheroes with this science-fiction-sounding superpower. This is the truth. I promise I’m not lying to you. I would never lie to you guys, I like you!

Part really-fun-General-Ed-class-in-college filled with jaunts into history, biology, and human anthropology, part character study that uses every crayon in the 133 Crayola Jumbo Pack to color vivid portraits of the greatest runners in ancient and recent history, and part inspirational sports movie (McDougall ends up competing in a 50 mile run with Tarahumara and some of the top marathoners in the world), BORN TO RUN is the kind of book that fills your head to bursting with the most fascinating anecdotes and provoking ideas and defibrillates the courage lying long dormant in your body with electric paddles charged to 900 volts.

This is the book that got me to start running, a feat that Haruki Murakami’s WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, much as I liked it, failed to accomplish. This is the book that got me out of my most favorite sedentary positions and up on my feet. I ignored that New York Times article that said sitting down and eating sugar kill you by sticking my fingers and screaming “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?” But I couldn’t ignore this book. I couldn’t ignore its rock-solid content, its high wire execution, and its hard-to-hear-and-imperative-to-listen-to message. We were not born to be Starbucks drinkers and Macbook users. We were born to be runners. So lace up, bitches. Lace. Up.

WHAT KIND OF BOYFRIEND IS HE- The REALLY healthy kind who eats six small meals a day, and one of those meals is a couple handfuls of nuts and another is a bag of supermarket lettuce. He has a standing up desk and he runs twelve miles before you get up in the morning and does ten thousand sit-ups after you are long asleep at night. You join him for runs and it is very embarrassing for you because such short distances make you feel like you are going to die so hard. But you run as much as you can. Not 100 miles. Maybe not even 3. But you do run. And after you guys run, you kiss a bunch. But he makes you kiss while doing sit-ups with your knees facing each other. Hey, it still counts, it’s still kissing!

MY DATE WITH BORN TO RUN:

We run, what did you think we were going to do?

Well, he runs.

I… try my best.

TRYING COUNTS.

BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS by Elissa Schappell (is my Girlfriend)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT: I tend to dislike trends. Whenever I follow a trend it makes me feel like a thirteen year old counting her dollars and quarters and dimes to see if she has enough money to buy Bieber Fever bedsheets or TWILIGHT-inspired tampons or whatever is cool with the Youth of America these days.

That said, I j’adore the literary-trend-of-the-last-few-years: the linked stories. This is when a book is a hybrid of both the novel and collection of short stories- a series of pieces that are connected by its characters,  too fragmented to strictly be considered a novel, too cohesive to fit into the short story box. We’ve had two recent Pulitzer Prize winners in this genre (2009′s OLIVE KITTERIDGE and 2011′s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD) as well as 2010′s bestselling THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. Linked stories are by no means a new idea (see: Sherwood Anderson, Mavis Gallant, Annie Proulx and Alice Munro) but it’s an idea that’s really taken hold in the last few years. Maybe it’s because it’s really hard to publish a traditional short story collection and make enough profit off of it to buy dinner for you and your editor at Carl’s Jr. Maybe it’s because we live in an era of soundbites and memes, and this narrative structure is like a glove fit for our modern era. In any case, I’m all kinds of on board for the Linked Story Train, and am a big fan of one of its most recent freight cars, Elissa Schappell’s BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS.

My Synopsis Gadget is collecting dust in my closet, let me just go grab it out and fire her up.

BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS features a series of contemporary American female protagonists, who range in age from teenage girls to middle aged moms. These women each appear as a central character in one story, and then as a minor character, and sometimes just a passing reference in another. Though they are spread wide across the social strata, what brings these women together is they are all dancing right on the edge of being totally and completely fucked up. It’s arguable that several of these women have tipped over that edge and are currently climbing out of the pool, soaking wet with fucked-upness

In several reviews I’ve read of this book, much mention is made of the monumental obstacles that are thrown into these women’s paths, like video game levels that are near-impossible to beat. A mother deals with her twenty-something daughter’s eating disorder over the phone. A college-aged girl is racked with guilt over the rape of a friend. A couple cannot conceive and this is unravelling the fabric of their marriage. A mother of a teenage boy attempts to protect her son from a young woman that reminds said mother too much of herself as a girl. The emotional stakes are sky high and that’s the metal hook that slides inside your cheek and yanks you across the pages of this slim volume. Still, it would be a disservice to the book if I didn’t talk about how much fun I had reading these linked stories. It was a dark kind of fun, to be sure, a-hearing-someone-confess-their-deepest-darkest-secrets-at-3-in-the-morning-kind-of-fun, where you are equal parts horrified and electrified. Still, even the most messed up kind of fun is still, technically fun. The prose is acid-tongued poetry, side-splitting and devastating. These stories are populated with tough-but-by-no-means-hardened women. Every story contains one, if not several moments of these characters finding their ribcages pried open and their beating hearts fully exposed to us, the readers.

Recommended for everyone who likes their fiction quick, modern, more than a little bit f-d up, and covered and smothered with awesome sauce.

WHAT KIND OF GIRLFRIEND IS SHE: Girl is sexy as a Bond Girl, smart as an Ivy League Grad, and mean as a hornet’s nest located right above a bear cave and right next to an alligator swamp. You have that first-love-got-to-see-you-every-possible-waking-minute with this lady love, but most of those waking minutes she’s tearing you three new ones. I mean, it’s your call, if you want a nice book girlfriend, you can go read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE for the twelfth time, it’s completely up to you.

MY DATE WITH BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS:

BLUEPRINTS helps me pick out what I’m going to wear today:

She says something devastating about this dress and the circumference of my thighs.

She says something devastating about this dress and my taste level.

She says something devastating about this dress and all my life choices up until this point.

She says more devastating things as I go back to bed for the rest of the day.

LOOK AT ME by Jennifer Egan (is my Girlfriend)

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT:

I read LOOK AT ME on bumpy-as-f***-busses in Kenya, by flashlight in tents in Tanzania, and during the extensive time spent at the hot, dusty border control in between. My time spent reading this book  forced me to completely reevaluate my reader-author relationship with Jennifer Egan.

Let’s get on a time-travelling Delorian  that runs on banana peels and lightning bolts and go back fifteen years. I ate up  Jennifer Egan’s first novel INVISIBLE CIRCUS with a spoon and a fork when I was in junior high school, in between Oprah club picks and Jane Austen novels. It knocked my shoes AND socks off. Let’s take the same Delorian back to last year when I listened to A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD on audiobook, as I drove from place to place in the summer heat of Los Angeles. I liked it. A lot. But I didn’t love it the way all my cooler-than-school-smart-enough-to-pass-the-Mensa-test-with-flying-colors literary friends loved this book. And I felt like the little-boy-in-the-crowd-in-Emperor’s-New-Clothes, but not in the smug and superior way that I usually do, it was the sad and lonely version of being the only one in the Emperor’s crowd that doesn’t see his stylish-pants new outfit.

Okay, banana-peel-and-clocktower-lightning the Delorian back to two weeks ago when I read LOOK AT ME in Ah-free-kah. Synopsis gadget, you know what to do.

The story starts with Charlotte Swenson, a mid-thirties model involved in a terrible car accident that completely shatters her face, forcing her to undergo reconstruction and emerge with eighty titanium screws and a reassembled and virtually unrecognizable face. Charlotte returns to New York invisible and unknown and  becomes involved with a self-destructive detective investigating one of Charlotte’s former handlers, Z. Meanwhile, in Rockford, Illinois we follow the lives of Charlotte’s childhood friend and her family, in particular a teenage daughter also named Charlotte and her borderline-tragic relationship with a teacher at a nearby high school who is not at all who or what he appears to be. The storylines of the several characters dance around each other, connections are revealed, and all comes explosively together in the end.

This book was five-hundred and forty-something pages, which ordinarily makes me want to chop off a hundred and fifty pages, but in the case of LOOK AT ME I was hooked from page one to page five-hundred-forty-whatever. I was hyper-aware of how much I liked this book from its smallest to its largest parts- sentences, paragraphs, chapters, bam-boom-book. There was one scene I had a hard time with, a filmmaking scene at the end. Having a sketchy idea of how film sets work, I could not believe anything in this scene would EVER happen with anyone around who had ever been paid to hold a camera up. In A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD I had a twin experience with “The Hat Chapter.” Having a sketchy idea of how dictatorships work, I could not believe anything in this chapter would ever happen, unless it was in the film version of V FOR VENDETTA, but that’s not saying much, because as a scene, pretty much the last thing you want is to be a scene from V FOR VENDETTA.

It’s a small sin. As a whole, I have a fully blown crush on the prose, the characters, the philosophy, the geometry and the machinations of LOOK AT ME. It’s also once again reinforced my theory that great literature is great gossip. The gossip in this book is the greatest. I’ve got to write a thesis and get it published somewhere fancy, I’m so right on this count.

LOOK AT ME  made me read Egan’s short stories EMERALD CITY, which I also have cartoon hearts in my eyes over. Her fourth book, THE KEEP is on deck, and am currently planning out in reading schedule when I’m going to revisit INVISIBLE CIRCUS and GOON SQUAD.

It’s quite a book that can get you scheduling your itinerary to read the rest of the author’s oeuvre, especially when you’ve just received so many awesome-sauce books for Christmas.

WHAT KIND OF GIRLFRIEND IS SHE: A super-judgemental and self destructive model with more issues than the Sunday New York Times. She makes for intense and insightful conversation and weird-but-still-sexy bedroom shenanigans. But she brings up the eighty titanium screws in her face a lot. Like a lot a lot. If you can deal with that, and the constantly-passing-through Bitch Train, score, score, and more score!

MY DATE WITH LOOK AT ME:

We pose in front of the mirror.

She’s better at modelling, because she’s a professional model.

But I don’t have eighty titanium screws in my face, winner winner!

Bangarang Books of 2011

Africa was exhausting and wonderful and terrifying and fantastic and now I’m back and I have to do an End of the Year Reading List.

End of the year lists make me nervous.

Not reading them. Reading them is great. They help me put books on hold at the library and figure out what to watch on Netflix Instant Viewing. Reading end of the year lists is the tops. Making them is… what’s ninety-seven notches below the tops? It’s that.

I feel like I’m a junior in high school again and I’m doing a practice AP test that’s going to be peer-reviewed and I’m going to be hardest-core judged  for my questionably correct answers. This is, of course, because I’ve been hardest-core judging major news outlets for their answers to their End of the Year Lists. There’s maybe one or two exciting and surprising picks on every list. Otherwise, it’s blah blah blah the incredible true story behind ART OF FIELDING selling for so much money blah blah can you believe Téa Obrecht was so young when she wrote TIGER’S WIFE blah blah more blah also that girl that wrote SWAMPLANDIA blah blah continuing with the blah Stephen King wrote a good novel again for the first time in forever… that’s what the NY Times and NPR’s lists sound like to me. And unlike an AP practice test, you don’t want to get all the same answers as your peers. At least I don’t, because if my list sounds like every other list… what’s the point in making the list? You have all those other lists, you don’t need my list, I could spend the hour and a half before everyone else wakes up in my house making breakfast or gardening or coming up with a new school of philosophy or something, anything that isn’t making this list.

But I don’t want to keep talking about how nervous Best of Lists make me because we all know that there’s nothing worse than someone who spends the entire assignment talking about how they don’t want to do the assignment.

The only time that ever worked is in the 2002 Spike Jonze film ADAPTATION.

I have to stop stalling and do my list now.

Let’s get this did.

BOOKS I J’ADORED THE MOST THAT CAME OUT IN 2011

BORN TO RUN: A HIDDEN TRIBE, SUPER ATHLETES, AND THE GREATEST RACE THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN- By Christopher McDougall

Not only did this book get me on the path to take up running (a previously thought-to-be-Herculean-task-impossible feat that even Murakami’s WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING couldn’t get my ass to do), it changed how I viewed history, biology, and humanity. This book was a north magnet to the south magnet of my brain. I wanted it to be eight hundred pages longer.

OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED- By Emma Straub

This book made me like short stories again. Too often over the past year or so, when I read the New Yorker or Best American Short Stories, I get a little-boy-in-the-crowd-in-Emperor’s New Clothes feeling. “Really, this? This? This?” I think. With OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED, I was thinking “Yes! Really! This! This! This!” The stories were hand-over-its heart honest and finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-21st century timely.

(I also CRAZY loved Elissa Schappell’s linked short stories BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS, but I made myself choose one.)

THE GETAWAY CAR- By Ann Patchett

BOSSYPANTS was really close to being my number one pick for Most Influential Book for Me as a Girl Writer, but GETAWAY CAR just squeaked ahead. Patchett’s teeny polka dot bikini memoir (it doesn’t cross the 200 page mark) of her life as a writer was engaging, inspiring, brain-shaping and brain changing. Also, Patchett was my Comeback Kid this year, because I didn’t love STATE OF WONDER the way I wanted to. No matter, this memoir-ella Rocky Balboa’d its way into both my heart and this list.

BOOKS THAT DIDN’T COME OUT IN 2011, BUT I READ THEM THIS YEAR AND J’ADORED THEM ALL THE SAME

THE STONE DIARIES by Carol Shields, A GREAT MAN by Kate Christensen, RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, JUST KIDS by Patti Smith, THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Mieville, SEX AT DAWN: THE PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF MODERN SEXUALITY by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

BOOKS THAT ARE COMING OUT IN 2012 THAT ARE PROBABLY GOING TO BE ON MY BEST OF 2012 LIST-

CARRY THE ONE by Carol Anshaw and WILD by Cheryl Strayed.