Without further ado, here’s what I read in August. Covers link to relevant reviews/posts.

And, oh yeah, there was this one, possibly the only YA book I’ll read this year.

It’s a tie between Mr. Peanut and A Visit from the Goon Squad for best book of the month, but these were all worthwhile (even Mockingjay, which I hated) for the thoughts and discussions they provoked. What was the best book you read in August?  Looking forward to anything in particular this month?

Happy Labor Day weekend to those of you reading this in the States.  I’m coming to you a little bit later in the day than usual and from a different location—after a whirlwind trip to Decatur, Georgia for the Decatur Book Festival, I’ve landed in St. Louis for a visit to the in-laws and some quality indie bookstore time.  Decatur was fabulous, such a great little city with local restaurants and really fantastic bookstores—I spent time (and money) at Little Shop of Stories and Blue Elephant Book Shop—and I couldn’t have had a better time.  It didn’t hurt that the weekend kicked off with a keynote address by Jonathan Franzen, whose new novel Freedom is my current read.

This week on the blog, I featured an interview with Mr. Peanut author Adam Ross and a review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is sure to make my best-of list for the year. I discussed busting into new genres and why I’m reading a romance novel, and then I raved about Marcy Dermansky’s new novel Bad Marie.

A few click-worthy links from the week:

• The Book Blogger Convention will be back in 2011!
• Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in a hilarious video (worth watching whether you’re interested in the book or not)
• The Bookrageous Podcast team wants to know what you thought about Mockingjay
• Publishers Weekly recaps the Franzen keynote at the Decatur Book Festival

Coming up this week, I have a recap of my August reading, a Bare Necessities guest post all about short stories, a discussion of my experience reading that romance novel I mentioned earlier, and maybe—just maybe, if I can find the motivation to write it—a review/rant/spoilerama of Mockingjay. Spoiler alert: I hated it.

Now I’m off to curl up with Jonathan Franzen and then enjoy the beautiful weather we’re having in the midwest this weekend. Hope you’re having an equally delightful day wherever you are.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky

Okay, so it’s more like the mid-day flight to Atlanta (whose airport, I’m pretty sure, is home to the fifth circle of hell), but that’s not nearly as snappy.

I’m heading out today to spend the weekend at the Decatur Book Festival to enjoy Jonathan Franzen delivering a keynote talk tonight—I’ve just started Freedom and so far, so good—and to present on a panel entitled Where Do I Go From Here?: Getting Your Book Noticed tomorrow morning at 10am. I’m honored to be alongside fellow presenters Ron Hogan, Julie Schoerke, and Stephen Usery, and if you’re in the area, I’d love to have you there.

I’m hoping to squeeze in a few indie bookstore visits and would appreciate suggestions (and recommendations for nearby restaurants) if you got ‘em.

In the meantime: assuming Freedom lives up to the hype, what kind of panties do you think are most appropriate for throwing?

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.

For most people this would be a disaster, but Marie, who should come off as a hot mess but is instead charming and sympathetic, spins it to her favor. She seduces her friend’s husband, Benoît Doniel, whom she thinks of as “the world’s most attractive, underappreciated living French author,” and they run off to Paris with his child in tow.

Oh, and have I mentioned that all of this happens shortly after Marie is released from prison, where she served six years for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery?

To say that our girl Marie “suffered from lapses in acceptable behavior” would be an understatement, but that’s exactly how Dermansky says it, and let me tell you, it works beautifully. Marie is self-absorbed and in fact cannot remember “the last time she had taken any interest in anything besides herself,” but Dermansky makes her irresistible. Sure, she runs off with her friend’s husband and kidnaps their child and has absolutely no concept of boundaries or appropriate behavior or sexual propriety (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg), but when she feels like “she [is] the only person alive with any integrity,” we kinda sorta feel that way too.

And here’s why: Marie is bad, and she knows it. And Dermansky knows it. And we know. So the jig is up. It would be easy to write this story and make Marie the character we love to hate. It would be easy to vilify her and invite us to judge her or allow us to feel self-righteous for being better than she is (even though it’s not hard to be less bad than Marie). What isn’t easy is taking a character whom we *should* hate and making us pull for her, and that is what makes Bad Marie so remarkable.

Dermansky tells Marie’s story with a cool detachment and a fabulous matter-of-fact-ness that tells us, right from the start, that this is just the way things are. Marie is Marie, and that is the state of the world, and we’d be better off not to question it. Then she proceeds to give us a hundred reasons to hate Marie while simultaneously making it impossible to do so.  Marie is selfish and immature and short-sighted, and she makes really, really bad choices.

She’s the girl you parents warn you to stay away from, and that makes her all the more desirable.

I tore through Bad Marie and loved every minute of it, and, well, that’s all I’m going to say. At 211 pages, Bad Marie is a small book with a big voice, and you won’t regret giving it a few hours of your time. 4 out of 5.

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!

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. 

Some might say this makes me a snob, but I think it means I know myself and what kinds of books I respond to, and because I don’t have unlimited reading time, I prioritize my reading choices accordingly. You will find no hair-tearingly earnest essays about why it is nobler/wiser/better/more upstanding to read out of your comfort zone on this blog. Oh no, I am decidedly not about the guilt trip here (but I will reserve the right to mock you openly if you attempt to extol the virtues of anything written by Stephenie Meyer).

What I *am* about is a healthy attitude toward experimentation (you were waiting for the innuendo, weren’t you?) and willingness to take feedback from trusted friends, and that’s where this little romance-reading adventure comes from.  I never read romance novels because I never thought I would find them interesting. I have a problem with suspension of disbelief, and my attitudes about love, sex, and marriage aren’t exactly traditional, and, well, I just made a bunch of assumptions about romance novels and the kinds of people who read them.

There. I said it.

My attitudes about romance novels have been shifting these last few months, though, and it’s because I have found myself in the company of progressive, intelligent, awesome women who share many of my worldviews and also love to read romance. So I’ve begun to think it’s not so much that romance novels aren’t right for me but that I just need to meet the right one.

Enter Sarah from the superfabulous best-romance-site-on-the-web Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and a Twitter conversation—really, where else could this happen—in which she offered to make a custom recommendation based on my reading taste.  When an expert makes an offer like this, the only acceptable answer is “yes,” so I rattled off a few of my recent favorites (Mr. Peanut, Day for Night, A Visit from the Goon Squad), and she diagnosed me as someone who likes multiple lines of narrative and layered plot lines (right on both counts), and she sent me off to order Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me (cover with link in right sidebar).

I’m about a quarter of the way through the book now, and so far it’s…well, it’s different. I don’t know what to expect or how to review it since I don’t have an big-picture understanding of the genre, and I’m fighting my urge to be critical about the fact that the heroine is a frumpy woman with low self-esteem. The writing is snappy, and the banter is witty, and I’m doing my best to lose myself in a story that I know is supposed to be a fantasy.

And I’m waiting for it to get dirty.

Will I become a fanatical reader of romance novels after this?  Probably not. But I’m satisfying a curiosity and hoping that I’ll discover another kind of “palette cleanser” book for in between the heavier reads, and, if nothing else, I’ll be able to say I’ve done it. And you just never know until you try, right?

That’s the beauty of experimentation.

I’d love to hear about your reading experiments here, and I hope you’ll stay tuned for a special Bare Necessities romance edition from Sarah in the next few weeks.

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.  Are you starting to get the picture?  As Frederick Reiken said in a guest post here last week:

It is as if we’ve clicked a link in each story, which then takes us to the next one.

The book takes its title from a conversation in which one character tells the other, “Time’s a goon,” and as we move in and out of stories, toward and away from characters, we realize that Egan is both playing with this concept and commenting on it. Her present-day characters live in our world, where relationships–and the stories that accompany them—often have no clear ending because they can be unexpectedly resumed and reshaped at any moment with the click of a button (namely that “send friend request” button we’re all so familiar with).  Sure, each character in this innovative novel has a beginning point and an ending point, but the distance between them is not defined by a straight line.

We–and Egan’s characters—experience time linearly/chronologically, but we rarely remember it that way. The stories of our lives are not so much point A to point B as they are winding narratives, and the technology and media we use to tell our stories, often as they are unfolding, shapes the way we experience and perceive them.

There’s much more to it than that, though. There are beautiful sentences like, “Mindy’s body is slender and elastic; she could slip through a keyhole, or under a door.” And there’s examination of memory and exploration of our desire to remember ourselves in certain ways, and there is acknowledgment of the ways in which this desire leads us to reconstruct moments and memories to fit our purposes. (This is probably a good place to mention that the book’s epigraph comes from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.)

The last chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad is, simply put, ballsy. Gutsy. Bold. Egan flashes forward about a decade into the future to wonder aloud about the effects technology will have on how we communicate and the language we’ll use to do it and what will happen in a world where no one ever really loses touch with anyone. It is shocking and frighteningly possible and a little bit exciting, and it just might make your brain explode…but in a very pleasing way.

The stories in this novel are connected, but they are not pieces of puzzle, and if you read them looking for a way to construct a single whole picture, you’ll just be missing the point. And you’ll be horribly confused. By experimenting with format, narrative structure, narrative voice, point-of-view, time, and, well, another handful or two of writing techniques, Egan succeeds in not only telling several people’s stories but forcing readers to think about how we take in moments as they occur and how we reshape them when we talk about them later.  She pushes the boundaries of contemporary fiction and gives us an entirely fresh (and refreshing) reading experience, and I’m just going to stop talking about it now and tell you that if you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t need a straight narrative and a clean ending, you don’t want to miss A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Official verdict: A Visit from the Goon Squad is pantyworthy, without a doubt, and likely to make the top five for the year.

Check out Jennifer Egan’s website for a further look into the creative mind behind this fabulous book.

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.   

Several years into drafting, however, I began to use more organized formal principles like fugue, counterpoint, and, as with M.C. Escher’s work, tessellation both to generate plot and to make the themes play off each other. I knew I wanted to integrate certain strategies of Hitchcock’s techniques, like the use of the MacGuffin, as well as content that was braided with his work. I realize that sounds highfalutin and hyper self-conscious but it was all secondary to the main goal: I was just trying to keep the act moving. Probably the thing that I hear back from readers most, and it gladdens my heart, is that they blow through the novel. The plot’s complex, sure, but for people who’ve enjoyed it, they tell me the story rips along.

Without question, the most difficult part came toward the latter stages of drafting, and by that I mean the last two years. How to fuse the disparate elements and voices of the novel into a Mobius band? At that point, when I was more conscious of both the themes I was working with and the novel’s rhythms, I did a great deal of obsessive outlining, all of which is to say that the book’s form and content were mutually generative. And since this is a book about a video game designer, here are two great cheats both for first-time readers and re-readers: pay attention to naming throughout, but especially to the difference between David and Pepin. That’s the key to understanding how the novel is supposed to function as an inescapable video game for its characters, and its “writers.” Next, flip back to the Escher print on the title page. It’s the novel’s source code.

The novel refers to M.C. Escher and all but warns readers that they will feel lost, stuck in a loop, unsure, at times, of which way is up. Did you ever consider making the allusions to Escher (and Hitchcock) less obvious, or were they necessary to help readers understand that the confusion is intentional?

AR: Of course. I look back now and think, “Oh, well, maybe I could have toned it down there and turned up the volume there,” but I don’t think about it for long because it’s done, I’m finishing my book of stories now, asking a completely different set of questions because they’re told in an entirely different mode. All I can tell you is that I followed my lights then and don’t lose sleep over it now. “In point of fact,” writes Humbert Humbert, “there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.” A reader like me reads that and is staggered and amazed by the hall-of-mirrors irony of those sentences, of their intertextual levels of play. And so, to readers who like those sorts of games, I say “picnic, lightning,” and they’ll know where I allude to that in Mr. Peanut. I tried to give the reader hints and clues, just as certain video game magazines supply players with cheats, cheat codes, and walk-throughs. Maybe I gave too many. I’ve read all my reviews—the great, the good, and the bad—and I can assure you of this: if I’d been less obvious, I’d have been roundly criticized by plenty of people who’d have said I should’ve have made things a little clearer.

Many reviewers have described the relationships in the novel as dysfunctional. To what extent do you think the relationships are dysfunctional, rather than just a window into the deepest, darkest thoughts of married people?

AR: I’d like every married critic who opined thusly to take a look in the mirror and say, with a straight face, “My relationship with my spouse is completely functional!”

I’m so tired of the word “dysfunctional,” honestly, because what works for Couple A might seem like madness to Couple B, a fact which points to the mysteriousness of marriage, not to mention that plenty of functioning couples have gone through patches where things were going pretty awfully. Dysfunction, it seems to me, is interlocked with its opposite over the course of any lasting relationship, just as plenty of people have injected destructive dysfunction into perfectly functioning marriages. Who the hell knows why? In lieu of dysfunctional, I’ll take Scott Turow’s description in his New York Times review: “a bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that passes for a marriage.”

What I’m writing about in Mr. Peanut is marriage’s cycling and re-cycling and how you go through periods of light and darkness, which in turn present opportunities for failure and redemption, for the infliction of harm upon each other and the chance to apply the balms of forgiveness and love. The Hastrolls, for instance, seize their chance at reaching a new understanding with each other. The Sheppards do too, but the people and forces they drew to them during their darkest hours brought destruction upon them—if, that is, we believe Sheppard’s testimony to Mobius. David and Alice failed to recover from tragedy and then lost each other afterward, in spite of the desperate lifeline Alice throws him before her disappearance. These missed opportunities are scary stuff, at least to me. Maybe that was what gave Stephen King nightmares when he read the novel.

The novel has been called “anti-marriage,” a claim with which you strongly disagree. Your characters seem to live in the tension between loving and hating each other, and one often leads directly into the other. Is this something you think exists in all marriages?  If your characters weren’t fantasizing about killing their partners, how might they deal with it?

AR: I can’t answer the last question because I’m a novelist, not a guru or psychologist. Also, I’ve never heard it called “anti-marriage.” Some critics, I think, have missed how pro-marriage a book it is. I had a letter posted in Slate about this that preceded the DoubleX blog’s audio book club discussion of the novel and is worth a look because it speaks to your question and also addresses how a lack of good housekeeping in marriage can sow the seeds of destruction and misery. In this way, Mr. Peanut presents readers with a series of cautionary tales or recognitions. In that way, I hope that it’s consciousness raising.

To take your question about whether the dialectic between love and hate exists in all marriages, I’m not dodging when I say that I don’t know. What I have observed over the course of my life is that the more time we spend with our partners the more vital and exasperating to us they become and, if we’re lucky, we manage to happily soldier on in spite of the latter and because of the former.

Read the other half of this interview at Brews and Books.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky

What a week it’s been!  This marked the beginning of my “tour of awesome,” and I had a different book-related event every day this week. It was a great way to bring the summer to a close and start thinking about fall, which makes me happy on oh so many levels.

On the blog this week, I discussed Susan Gregg Gilmore’s new novel The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and I had the pleasure of hosting a Q & A with her at Fountain on Monday night. The event was well-attended, and it was fun to shake things up and move away from the traditional author event format for a night. I can’t wait to do more of these in the coming months!  On Wednesday night, I saw Amy Dicksinson, author of The Mighty Queens of Freeville, and Thursday night, I sat on a panel for The Writing Show (sponsored by James River Writers) about social media for authors with Kelly Justice (the owner of Fountain), Ron Hogan (of Beatrice.com), and Joe Wallace (author of Diamond Ruby).

I also highlighted some of my favorite books that are now available in paperback, brought back the ever-popular Pillow Talk feature,  and shared a Bare Necessities annotated reading list by Frederick Reiken, author of Day for Night, focused on novels that deal creatively with time. 

The Bookrageous Calendar launched this week, as did the second Bookrageous podcast, and I am beyond excited about where the Bookrageous projects are going. I hope you’ll consider buying a calendar (ALL proceeds go to First Book) and subscribing to the podcast.

As far as reading goes…well….there wasn’t much of this week, but I did manage to get through Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie, which I loved and found to be the perfect palette cleanser after the heavy books I’ve been reading lately.  I’m currently about halfway through Mockingjay (the third and final book in the popular young adult Hunger Games trilogy), and I have to say I’m underwhelmed. Like, IT’S REALLY NOT VERY GOOD. AT ALL.

But more on that later.

Click-worthy:

• If you’re a fan of depressing reads, don’t miss these six books that hurt so good

• Bookrageous in Shelf Awareness

• A bookseller questions the violence in the Hunger Games trilogy

• River City Fiction gives highlights from the talk at the James River Writers event

This week, I’ll be featuring an interview with Mr. Peanut author Adam Ross and discussing A Visit from the Goon Squad and Mockingjay, and I’ll be gearing up to spend the weekend at the Decatur Book Festival, where I’ll be on another panel about authors and social media.  I can’t wait to check out Decatur’s indie bookstores and see Jonathan Franzen give what I’m sure is a hotly-anticipated keynote talk after all the hype these last few weeks.

For now, it’s back to Mockingjay (which I’ve taken to calling Mediocrejay).  What are you reading today?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky

Show notes:

Intro Music; Bust a Move – Matthew Morrison

What We’re Reading;

• Rebecca – Bad Marie
• Ali – Stiff, Queen and Country, Vol 4
• Josh – Mockingjay, Good Eggs, Sleepwalker

Break Music; Ahab – MC Lars

What do we want to read more of?

• Literary Fiction – A Visit From the Goon Squad, Mr Peanut, The Passage
• US History – The Wordy Shipmates, Founding Brothers, To Hell on a Fast Horse
• Historical Fiction – Cutting for Stone, the Master and Commander series
• Graphic Novels – The Complete Essex County, Local, Parker: The Hunter, Phonogram
• Young Adult – The Hunger Games trilogy, Black Hole Sun

Buy the Bookrageous Calendar!

Find Us Online (collectively) – Twitter, Tumblr, Formspring

Find Us Online (individually) – Josh, Rebecca, Ali

Outro Music; My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors – Moxy Fruvous