Caught In a Bad Romance with BAD MARIE

2010 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

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Published June 2010 by HarperPerennial

You know a book is good when it inspires me to bastardize Lady Gaga lyrics.

Or it’s a sign of the coming apocalypse.

In the case of Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie, the book is fabulous, and I want all of the love and none of the revenge. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I had high hopes for Bad Marie long before we met face-to-face, as several trusted friends raved about it and told me I simply had to read it, and it didn’t disappoint. In fact, it was love from the very first line…but that’s not hard to believe when the first line is this:

Sometimes, Marie got a little drunk at work.

And she doesn’t just get drunk. She gets drunk and falls asleep in the bathtub with the little girl she is babysitting. And the girl’s parents (a friend of Marie’s from childhood and her husband, who happens to be an author whose book Marie adores) come home and find them there. Marie drunk and naked and asleep. In the bathtub. Read more

On Becoming a Reader

2010 at 12pm     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

The lovely Carina at Reading Through Life created a weekly feature called Reading Roots in which she interviews other bloggers about, well, their literary backgrounds and the history of their reading habits. She was kind enough to invite me to contribute, so if you don’t get enough of my opinions here (especially after this morning’s post), you can learn all about how I became a reader at her blog today.

Go pay her visit and just try not to be jealous of the Scrabble tile design motif!

On Busting into New Genres

2010 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

This post inspired by Bookrageous Podcast, Episode 2.

People, I am doing something I never thought I’d do (and which I’m pretty sure I SWORE I’d never do) in a million years.

I am reading a romance novel!

That’s right. It’s a book all about love and the search for Mr. Right—or maybe just Mr. Right Now—(And sex. I hope to god there’s some steamy sex to make it worthwhile).  And the cover is sky blue with shoes on it. Shoes! On the cover of a book!  And I’m reading it! I feel like I’m in that episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon goes to the beach and reads a pink book entitled Novel for Women.

I’m approaching my twenty-eighth birthday and I’ve never read a book like this. Sure, I’ve read some books that could be classified as “women’s fiction,” and I’ve taken “chick lit” to the beach a few times (I’m putting these classifications in quotation marks because I don’t totally buy into them, and I tend to think books with the same subject matter but written by men are treated and classified differently), but I’ve never read a real, true romance novel. I’ve never had the desire to.

I will confess: I have always assumed that romance novels are cheesy, formulaic, reductive (in the sense that they present women as desperate-for-love stereotypes), and lacking the kind of literary merit I look for in the books I read.  Read more

Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2010 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Published June 2010 by Knopf

Lovers of the linear narrative and start-at-point-A-and-end-at-point-B story beware! Jennifer Egan is back, and she’s not messing around.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a collection of interconnected stories (a format I have grown to love) that move back and forth in time, from one character to the next and back again, and appear in first-, second-, and third-person narration. And there’s a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint slideshow.

It begins with Sasha, who steals another woman’s wallet in the restroom of a restaurant while her date waits at the bar. Then we meet Sasha’s boss Bennie, a high-powered music producer who shakes gold flakes into his coffee with hopes that they will make him more virulent. And then it’s a flashback to Bennie’s highschool years, presented from the perspective of his friend Rhea. We see the party at which Bennie meets his future mentor Lou.

And then it’s 1973, and Lou is in Africa with his girlfriend Mindy.  Read more

Interview with MR. PEANUT author Adam Ross

2010 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

I’ve made no secret of my near-obsession with Adam Ross’s debut novel Mr. Peanut—which I have now read twice (once in manuscript form and once in final copy)—and my plans to throw panties at Mr. Ross at the first opportunity. I was thrilled when he agreed to do a Q & A that would pull back the curtain and give readers a peek into the editorial process and the mind that created this incredibly complex and multi-layered novel. The fact that my friend Josh Christie (Brews and Books), who first recommended the novel to me, joined me for the interview made it all the better. Mr. Peanut is utterly unforgettable, and the writing is genius, and this, my friends, is just a little taste.  You’ll find the second half of the interview at Josh’s blog this afternoon.

Mr. Peanut has a pretty labyrinthine plot, with point-of-view and the chronology of events jumping all over the place. When you were plotting the book, did you plan everything for the characters one at a time from start to finish, or did you jump around?

AR: The short answer is no, I didn’t plan or plot things out at first. Large chunks of the novel were written out of sequence, a method Nabokov used. He was very methodical in this unconsecutive approach—he wrote his novels on index cards, writing scenes and set pieces out of order and then placing them in a shoe box front to back—though I’ve adopted it more consciously now.
When I began drafting, it was more of an inspirational plunge. My father told me about the death of my second cousin, her suspicious suicide that her husband witnessed—or the murder he perpetrated—that exactly mirrors Alice’s murder/suicide in the novel, and in a single sitting I wrote three chapters that very closely resemble what’s in the book now. I didn’t know what I was doing on a macro level but almost immediately knew the novel’s last line (like a lodestar, it gave me direction during the whole journey) and I did think those initial pages had drive, so I wanted to keep building on them. Also, if you’re going to write a novel that plays with chronology or loops away from the central plot, well, those digressions better be tour de force stuff or else you’ll lose the reader, so in momentum and inspiration I trusted.    Read more

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