Book Review: Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

Title: Dear Mr. You
Author: Mary-Louise Parker
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: mild language, abuse, sex

In Dear Mr. You, actress and writer Mary-Louise Parker writes letters to the men in her life, from her grandfather to her ex-fiance to her son (and many fellows in between). In this memoir, we see Parker obliquely, not as part of a narrative but as a narrator, filtering her one-sided vision of interactions with these men. The idea for the book is ambitious, and the execution is pretty genius. There were times when the lack of a clear narrative made this book easy to set aside for a while, but I was always happy when I picked it up again. I feel that eventually, a picture of the author emerges that might have been more obscured through a more conventional format.

Book Review: Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Title: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Authors: Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a clean read

Before picking up Notorious RBG, I didn't know all that much about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the nine justices who serves in the US Supreme Court. I mean, I knew she leaned to the left, liked to work out, and fell asleep during the State of the Union, all of which made me feel a sense of kinship with her, but I didn't know much about her beyond that. Notorious RBG changed that. It helped me see RBG not as a woman who got where she is in life because she prioritized career over family, but as a woman who delighted in marriage and motherhood, and was inspired by her relationships to fight for the rights of women. When I read obituaries (which I often do), I'm struck by how often the circumstances of someone's life lead them down a particular path. While Ginsburg married right out of college and had a baby on a military base within a couple of years, she also had a uniquely supportive spouse, and his cancer treatments while they were in law school meant that she only had one child for many years. While his condition likely felt devastating to the young family, in some ways they also enabled RBG to give more attention to her career than she may have been able to do had she been raising a larger family. Notorious RBG humanizes Ginsburg, and gives equal weight to quirky things about her private life (she's apparently really good at doing pushups) and the significant achievements in her public life. This is a quick read, and one I enjoyed.

Book Review: Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

Title: Year of Yes:  How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun, and Be Your Own Person
Author: Shonda Rhimes
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Acknowledgement of sex, swearing

Shonda Rhimes is one of my guilty pleasures. I watched Grey's Anatomy with an almost religious fervor when my kids were little, and I still tune in to TGIT for Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. Heck, I even watched every episode of Off the Map. And as much as I may mock the Shonda Rhimes dramatic monologue, you know I'm a secret fan.

And it's a good thing, because Year of Yes is basically one extended Shonda Rhimes dramatic monologue. The story starts when Rhimes's sister says to her, one Thanksgiving, "You never say yes to anything," and Rhimes decides that for a year, she's going to get out of her comfort zone and say yes to opportunities for growth in her path. These range from giving commencement addresses and losing half her body weight to playing with her children and having the courage to end relationships. There's a lot to be learned here about the ruts we tend to let ourselves fall into, and how to get out of them. I have talked with lots of friends about how much I love her chapter on "doing it all." Rhimes contends that there's no way we can do it all, and her nanny is the only way she's even able to pretend, but even then, when she's succeeding in one aspect of her life, she's letting other areas slide. That was so refreshing for me to hear (trying to write, right now, with a child actually sitting on my lap watching YouTube). I also really loved her insights into her characters, and how ambitious, arrogant intern Christina Yang (from Grey's Anatomy) represented who she was early in her career and powerful, isolated, morally ambiguous Olivia Pope (from Scandal) represents some of how she has felt as she's achieved more success. This is a really fun read, whether or not you're a fan of Shondaland like I am.

Book Review: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Title: Alexander Hamilton
Author: Ron Chernow
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible

Just like everyone else on the planet, I've been swept up in the fervor over Alexander Hamilton. I was "this close" to making our entire family detour to NYC during our summer vacation so I could go see the play (by myself, because tickets for eight would cost bank). I was so captivated by Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical (and cultural phenomenon) that I finally cracked the book that has been sitting on our shelf for more than a decade, Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I'm not an avid reader of biographies. In fact, I had to create a tag for biographies when I was reviewing this book. But my friend Michelle told me that if I listened to this one, I wouldn't be disappointed. She was absolutely right. While Alexander Hamilton's included the jubilant highs and devastating lows of high drama, the story is putty in Chernow's able hands. He makes the villains (Burr, Adams, Jefferson) and the heroes (Washington, Lafayette) come to life, and Hamilton shines as someone who's as complicated as any central figure in a Shakespearean tragedy. When I started listening the 30+ hour audio version, I was really skeptical, but it took me about a week to power through the story. It's definitely worth a listen, and fans of the musical might just find themselves singing along.

Book Review: Purity by Jonathan Franzen

Title: Purity
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Enjoyment Rating: DNF
Source: Digital Copy

I think I started reviewing books on this blog eight years ago. Since that time, I've reviewed everything I've read, and there hasn't been a single time when I haven't finished a book. There have been books I would have preferred not to finish, but I powered through. But I couldn't power through Purity, Jonathan Franzen's newest novel. The first two hundred pages of the book (which I where I gave up) follow Purity, a recent college graduate living in the Bay Area, from her crappy job in Oakland to her mother's house in rural California, to Bolivia, where she takes an internship with a German anarchist.

I've said this before about Franzen's characters in other novels, and I think it applies here. When I read a book I need someone to care about, especially in a book that's more than 500 pages long. That doesn't mean I need someone I identify or agree with, but just someone about whom I want to know more. Franzen's characters tend to be people I don't care about (this was more true in Freedom than in The Corrections, where I actually did care about the characters, despite finding them kind of repugnant). There was no one for me to hold onto in the first two hundred pages of Purity. Her friends are nasty squabbling squatters, her mom is flaky and narcissistic, and she seems to float on the wind between these characters. Maybe it's because I tried to read this novel on a tropical beach, where everything was warm and sunny and kind of perfect, but I could not find purchase here.

Book Review: Between You and Me by Mary Norris

Title: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Author: Mary Norris
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some mild swearing

There are some kinds of books that simply don't lend themselves to being made into audiobooks. Comic books and math textbooks, for example, have such important visual components that the transition to an audio format would require extra descriptions, and a lot would still be lost in the translation. You might not expect that a memoir would suffer from the same fate, but Mary Norris's Between You and Me is definitely a book where the audiobook feels like a pale imitation of the original. Yes, it's true, there are lots of places where Norris tells engaging stories about her life as a copyeditor for The New Yorker. The book is completely irreverent, and she tells hilarious stories (the story about her obsession with #1 pencils was my favorite). However, there are lots of places where she's talking about how the printed word appears on a page. When she talks about the placement of commas, for example, this listener was totally lost. Although I'm an editor, I'm much more a big-picture (or is it "big picture"?) kind of person, and I tend not to care much about the minutae of grammar. In that sense Norris's book felt both pedantic and like I finally started to understand why some people care so dang much about when to use "who" and when to use "whom." If you pick this book up, you'll probably enjoy it, but listening to it often left me frustrated and confused, which is not the feeling you want a reader to have when attempting to demystify grammar.

Book Review: Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

Book Review: Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)
Author: Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: this is a VERY adult book, readers spend a lot of time inside the mind of a serial killer, possibly the most disturbing book I've read in a long time

Career of Evil, the third tale of private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, begins with Robin opening a package containing a woman's severed leg. Press coverage surrounding the event threatens to sink the business, and Strike becomes convinced that someone from his past sent the leg to exact revenge. With no other cases on their docket, Strike and Ellacott, follow the paths of several men who used to know Strike, in hopes of finding the killer before he hits closer to home.

I recently listened to an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour in which Barrie Hardymon interviewed JK Rowling about writing the book. The episode is worth a listen (it's pretty short), and it touches on a lot of the things I felt while reading the novel. First of all, we spend lots of time in this book inside the mind of a serial killer, which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. I don't get icked out by much of what I read, but there were times when I wondered if I wanted to finish this book. Ultimately, I'm glad that I did, because I'm a firm believer that we expand our worldview when we learn about points of view that are different from our own, but this was a very difficult book to read sometimes. Also, I was glad that Hardymon and Rowling talked about the sexism in the book. The side story in the book deals with Robin's upcoming wedding, and if you've read either of the first two books, you probably recognize that Matthew, Robin's fiance, is someone she's with more out of comfort and a sense of duty than because she really wants to spend the rest of her life with him. Rowling talks about Matthew's subtle sexism, but I'm equally interested in Strike's subtle sexism. Career of Evil is fast-paced, expertly plotted, and really thoughtful, and while it was definitely for me, I know that it's not for everyone.

Book Review: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Title: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: maybe some language?

Have you ever wanted to live creatively but felt mired in the everyday miasma of living? I do. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about steps to take to live a creative life. She talks a lot about the spirituality of creative inspiration, which I really love about the book. And yes, it's a motivational rah rah sort of book, and that's just what I need right now. You see, I don't just read books and review books. I've always wanted to write books. Right now, I'm about 50 pages into the first draft of a novel. It's an idea that I've had percolating for a while (if you have an hour I'd be happy to tell you all about it), and I gave myself a deadline-- by the end of this school year, I want to have a complete draft. But finding time to write with six kids and a job and editing Segullah and being primary president isn't easy. So I need the motivational speeches.

I wrote a post about this book the other day at Segullah, and how it both inspires and scares me. This book could change your life, but probably not if you listen to the audiobook. I felt similar to how I felt when I listened to Brene Brown's Rising Strong-- that when you listen to an audiobook, it's hard to stop and think and take notes (I usually listen when I'm running or folding laundry or driving), so a lot of the stuff I want to remember gets missed. And it's probably better to mete out the motivation bit by bit. When I was a senior in high school, I spent the whole year collecting quotes, which I printed out on my word processor and then cut into tiny hearts and pinned to the bulletin board in my freshman dorm room. I feel like I could pin a whole board of quotes from this book that would be useful to me as a writer, but now I've forgotten all of them. Never fear, though, Gilbert has a podcast that serves as a companion to the book, and I'm waiting to listen to the first episode when I need an extra dash of motivation.

Book Review: After You by Jojo Moyes

Title: After You (Me Before You #2)
Author: Jojo Moyes
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: sex and language

Remember Louisa Clark, the heroine of Jojo Moyes's Me Before You? When After You opens, months have passed since Lou helped Will, her quadraplegic employer (and the man she was hopelessly in love with), commit suicide, and she's floundering. She doesn't know how to redirect her career and is working at an awful bar. She's still too in love with Will to date, and she's drinking too much. When she falls off the roof of her London apartment building and narrowly escapes death, she realizes that she needs to make some serious changes in her life in order to keep living. So she reluctantly agrees to join a support group, meets a difficult teenager who needs some help, and everything starts to fall in place.

I loved Me Before You. It was one of those books that made me sob. It felt both completely heartbreaking and unfair, and beautiful and right. I wouldn't say that After You is quite as emotional as its predecessor, but it felt very real. Someone in Lou's position probably would struggle after the experience she went through, and in this way, it was nice to see what happens after "the end." And while the highs and lows weren't as high or low, they were sweet and meaningful on a smaller scale. There's a lot of redemption in After You, and it's lovely to see Louisa grow into womanhood in this novel.

Book Review: The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

Title: The Masqueraders
Author: Georgette Heyer
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read

When I was growing up, I knew a family with several sons and daughters. The sons in the family were all petite and small boned, while the daughters were tall and broad. In The Masqueraders, Prudence Tremaine and her brother Robin use the same situation to their advantage. Since their father played a part in the Jacobite revolution, they've had to change their identities, with Prudence becoming Mr. Peter Merriott and Robin assuming the role of his sister, Kate. They ingratiate themselves into London society, and the ruse works until they fall in love and are accused of murder, and somehow, they have to use all of the skills of trickery they learned from their father to come out on top.

The Masqueraders is a really interesting book on several fronts. First and foremost, I love Heyer's portrayal of Prudence/Peter and her love interest, Sir Anthony Fanshawe. Fanshawe admires Peter, and grows to love Prudence, not despite the fact that she's been disguised as a man, but for her strength. Instead of rescuing her, Fanshawe and Prudence work together to help her get through the situation she faces. I also adored the twist that comes late in the book when the Tremaine's father appears. It's genius. The Masqueraders is really fun and funny. It feels a lot like a Regency-era Shakespearean comedy, complete with mistaken identity, cross-dressing, and multiple marriages at the end.