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jennifer's reviews
173 reviews
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
5.0
A great book for anyone who, like me, works in tech and loves books and writing. I particularly enjoyed the parallels drawn between these two arenas, like when the protagonist, Clay, compares a programming language, Ruby, to the poetry of Billy Collins or when the love interest, Kat, posits that writers have had their historical go at impacting the human OS (citing Shakespeare's invention of the internal monologue) and now it's the turn of developers.
Speaking of OSs, the novel includes a crude version of the date scene in Spike Jonze's Her when Clay attends a party at Kat's via video on her laptop. It is also reminded me a bit of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette? only poking fun at Google instead of Microsoft. One of the funniest scenes take place at Google, where Kat works, when Clay comes to visit her and has to get in the "externals" lunch line because all the Google employees are given stimulants in their food. Suffice it to say if you liked Her (which I really wish would have been a novel before a film) and you liked Bernadette, I think you'll like this.
Speaking of OSs, the novel includes a crude version of the date scene in Spike Jonze's Her when Clay attends a party at Kat's via video on her laptop. It is also reminded me a bit of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette? only poking fun at Google instead of Microsoft. One of the funniest scenes take place at Google, where Kat works, when Clay comes to visit her and has to get in the "externals" lunch line because all the Google employees are given stimulants in their food. Suffice it to say if you liked Her (which I really wish would have been a novel before a film) and you liked Bernadette, I think you'll like this.
My Venice and Other Essays by Donna Leon
5.0
I bought this book not because I am a particular fan of Commissario Brunetti—although several years ago I did read one and enjoy it—but because I am a fan of Venice, a city I fell in love with when I spent a university semester abroad there.
While I enjoyed Leon's reflections on Venice—the trash, the tourists, the bureaucracy, the beauty—the most striking thing about the writing is how unflinchingly herself Donna Leon is, which seems to vary between outrageous to the point of unlikable, mildly prudish, and utterly charming. A case in point for the last is this passage from her essay, Italian Men: “Most interchanges between a man and a woman here, whether they take place between a woman and her lover or between a woman and the man who sells her cheese and prosciutto, are charged by some mutual recognition of, at however wild and improbable a distance, sexual possibility…and so with pecorino comes a compliment, with the stracchino a smile that lights the heart and speaks of what might have been.”
Here was the Frances Mayes version of Donna Leon I had subconsciously been expecting of this book. But she doesn’t stick around for long. In her assessment of how tourism is ruining Venice, Leon dares to compare tourists to terrorists. Granting that terrorists “do kill people” she goes on ask:
“Shall we consider aesthetics? Okay, terrorists do run around in plastic flip-flops and pajamas, often wearing kitchen towels on their heads, but are they not thin and wiry, often handsome? They do not crowd into basilicas and museums in their Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes, nor has one ever been observed with a plastic water bottle or wearing an iPod and a baseball cap while ostensibly observing the Pietà.”
This passage—to say nothing of her essay later in the book, No Tears for Lady Di—puts her in a class of political incorrectness rarely seen today in American media. But then I realized what was going on. Donna Leon wasn’t trying to win me over with a charming and unexpectedly soft take on the Italian male. She wasn’t trying to make me like her. She was just writing it like she saw it, whether about Italians, or romantic opera, or the terrible tourists. For Ms. Leon, a professed technophobe who included an essay on her belated adoption of email in the book, hasn’t been reduced to a validation-seeking drone, tweeting and tapping her life away on social media. And for this I liked her all the more.
While I enjoyed Leon's reflections on Venice—the trash, the tourists, the bureaucracy, the beauty—the most striking thing about the writing is how unflinchingly herself Donna Leon is, which seems to vary between outrageous to the point of unlikable, mildly prudish, and utterly charming. A case in point for the last is this passage from her essay, Italian Men: “Most interchanges between a man and a woman here, whether they take place between a woman and her lover or between a woman and the man who sells her cheese and prosciutto, are charged by some mutual recognition of, at however wild and improbable a distance, sexual possibility…and so with pecorino comes a compliment, with the stracchino a smile that lights the heart and speaks of what might have been.”
Here was the Frances Mayes version of Donna Leon I had subconsciously been expecting of this book. But she doesn’t stick around for long. In her assessment of how tourism is ruining Venice, Leon dares to compare tourists to terrorists. Granting that terrorists “do kill people” she goes on ask:
“Shall we consider aesthetics? Okay, terrorists do run around in plastic flip-flops and pajamas, often wearing kitchen towels on their heads, but are they not thin and wiry, often handsome? They do not crowd into basilicas and museums in their Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes, nor has one ever been observed with a plastic water bottle or wearing an iPod and a baseball cap while ostensibly observing the Pietà.”
This passage—to say nothing of her essay later in the book, No Tears for Lady Di—puts her in a class of political incorrectness rarely seen today in American media. But then I realized what was going on. Donna Leon wasn’t trying to win me over with a charming and unexpectedly soft take on the Italian male. She wasn’t trying to make me like her. She was just writing it like she saw it, whether about Italians, or romantic opera, or the terrible tourists. For Ms. Leon, a professed technophobe who included an essay on her belated adoption of email in the book, hasn’t been reduced to a validation-seeking drone, tweeting and tapping her life away on social media. And for this I liked her all the more.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh
5.0
Sandra Tsing Loh delivers again. It's hard to fault a woman who coins the term "reverse Kegel." Funny, fast read. Perfect for summer, even if you're not perimenopausal.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
5.0
It didn't dawn on me that this book is in many ways an American version of Brideshead Revisited until, a few days after I finished it, I happened across this article on Brideshead in a Guardian series on Families in Literature, http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/23/families-in-literature-the-flytes-in-brideshead-revisited-by-evelyn-waugh, which makes the case that "Brideshead is not a book about Oxford, or homoerotic love, or social climbing: it’s a book about religion – and about families."
Like Charles in Brideshead, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, the protagonist of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, is a man without strong family ties. Paul's father committed suicide when he was a child and his mother is in a nursing home, no longer emotionally or intellectually available. And just as Charles fell hard for the Flytes, the family of his college best friend, Sebastian (“That summer term with Sebastian,” he says, “it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood.”), Paul keeps falling in love with the close-knit, religious families of his girlfriends. First there were the Catholic Santacroces, echoing the Catholic Flytes in Brideshead, then the Jewish Plotzes, then something altogether more enticing, a sort of uber-family in the form of an entire (fictional) lineage of Biblical provenance, the Ulms.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a dark book and it probably says something difficult about me that I related to the main character. Despite its darkness, and unlike Brideshead Revistited, it manages to have a happy ending twice, first in the last chapter and then again in the epilogue. I read it just before Christmas and found it oddly hopeful, which may explain why it's turned out to be my favorite book of the year. It's been a surprise to see it excluded from so many year-end best of lists, although I suppose its inclusion on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist is all the lists it needed to make.
Like Charles in Brideshead, Dr. Paul O'Rourke, the protagonist of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, is a man without strong family ties. Paul's father committed suicide when he was a child and his mother is in a nursing home, no longer emotionally or intellectually available. And just as Charles fell hard for the Flytes, the family of his college best friend, Sebastian (“That summer term with Sebastian,” he says, “it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood.”), Paul keeps falling in love with the close-knit, religious families of his girlfriends. First there were the Catholic Santacroces, echoing the Catholic Flytes in Brideshead, then the Jewish Plotzes, then something altogether more enticing, a sort of uber-family in the form of an entire (fictional) lineage of Biblical provenance, the Ulms.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a dark book and it probably says something difficult about me that I related to the main character. Despite its darkness, and unlike Brideshead Revistited, it manages to have a happy ending twice, first in the last chapter and then again in the epilogue. I read it just before Christmas and found it oddly hopeful, which may explain why it's turned out to be my favorite book of the year. It's been a surprise to see it excluded from so many year-end best of lists, although I suppose its inclusion on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist is all the lists it needed to make.