The Suckies (because they can't all be winners)

Reading is an experience, and not all experiences are good ones. Hence, The Suckies:

Dumbest Character :
Isabel Bookbinder, The Glamourous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder. This book is purportedly chick lit, though it was more like chick sh*t. Chick-lit heroines are supposed to be funny and relatable: am I supposed to be able to relate to an idiot like Isabel? If so, I'm offended on behalf of myself and womankind. There's flawed, as chick-lit heroines always are, and there's so stupid that you think that Balkan means someone is from a place called Balka. Stupid, stupid Isabel believes that the key duties of a novelist are wearing cashmere track-suits and gazing out the window. She proves herself too dumb to live on multiple occasions, and yet the book implies that I am supposed to be pulling for her. I think not. Isabel is a pathetic rip-off the inimitable Bridget Jones, and for that, she is my Dummy of the Year.

Most Loathsome Protagonist

• Hate. Hate. HATE!!! Damn Leo from damn Random Acts of Heroic Love. Worst. Character. Ever. Loathsome like nobody's business. I can't even get into the specifics of it again, so please click the link if you need a reminder of how awful this douchebag is: http://readblogadmire.blogspot.com/2009/02/random-acts-continued.html

Book You Should Use if You Run Out of Toilet Paper

• The Journal of Mortifying Moments, by Robyn Harding. Pointless, just pointless. If you read one crappy, bland, paint-by-numbers piece of chick-lit trash this year, don't make it this one.

The Great, Now I'm Bored and Depressed Award

• Precious, by Sandra Novack: Bleak, bland, blah.
  
  Least Worthy Nonfiction Book of the Year
• You're a Good Mom (and Your Kids Aren't So Bad, Either): 14 Secrets to Finding Happiness between Super Mom and Slacker Mom, by Jennifer Singer: A book full of stuff I either already knew or don't care about. Thanks.
  
  Worst Reading Experience of the Year

It's a three-way tie! The Glamourous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder made me roll my eyes until I think I pulled something; The Journal of Mortifying Moments made me wonder why I ever learned to read; and the Leo-centric half of effing Random Acts of Heroic Love made me want to rip out each page and paper-cut myself to death. It may be lonely at the top, but there's loads of company at the bottom. Congratulations--you suck!

The 2009 Bookie Awards!

Rather than compile a list of my favorite and least favorite books from the past year (not all of which I have blogged about, contrary to my original intentions), I'm having a glamourous awards ceremony to recognize those that entertained or enlightened me and to give a big old swirlie to those that wasted my time. Of course, the glamour and the ceremony are all in my head, but allow me my delusions. Feel free to picture me in a fantastic red-carpet gown...or the Björk swan dress. It's all good.

So here we have the Oscars of my reading from the past year. Publication dates mean nothing! Ladies and gentleman, it's the Bookie Awards (and coming soon, my reading Razzies, the Suckies)!

The Bookies!

Favorite Character in a Novel

• Judd Foxman, This is Where I Leave You. Judd is funny and believable, and his narrative voice is one reason that I loved This is Where I Leave You so much.
• Runner-up: Beatrice Hempel, The Ms. Hempel Chronicles. I could relate to her in so many ways, and sometimes that's what you want in a book.

No, this is just a hot-pink edition of War and Peace: Guilty Pleasure of the Year

• The Mating Habits of the North American WASP, by Lauren Lipton. Was this by the book chick-lit? Yes, ma'am! Hot pink details on the cover? Check. Hip urban lady with man troubles? Check. Arrogant, maddening, gorgeous man? Check! Dislike turns into love? You better believe it! Everything about this book was predictable, but the writing was smart, the characters were likeable, and it was just fun. I love a fun book, so there ya go.

Can I Offer You a Cuppa, Dear? Comfiest Book of the Year

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. I pictured a young Julie Andrews as the main character in this book. It was so British and retro--the perfect rainy-day read.

Lifetime Achievement (in Entertaining Me)

• This prestigious award goes to the delightful Maeve Binchy. I first read Circle of Friends in high school, and I've loved ol' Maeve ever since. The Glass Lake and Echoes are my other two favorites of hers; I just love how Irish and old-school they are. Heart and Soul, which I read this year, is not my favorite of her novels, but it still entertained me. She keeps churning out the books, and I keep reading them. Congrats, Maeve Binchy, for 15 years of entertaining me. Many have tried; most have failed.

Pluckiest Heroine

• I expected it to be Eilis from Brooklyn, but I ended up without much love for her. Instead, my Pluckiest Heroine of the year is Leila of The Nightingale. She is so courageous that other plucky heroines pale in comparison. She is strong and admirable, and I really enjoyed reading about her.
• Runner-up: Crystal Renn, Hungry. Okay, so Crystal is real rather than fictional; that shouldn't disqualify her from this category. Before she's even out of her teens, Crystal takes on the fashion industry and forges a brand-new path. Love her.

Best Nonfiction Reading Experience of the Year

• How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. I loved Sassy. Now I know the truth about what happened to it. Thanks, Jesella and Meltzer.
• Runner-up: The Wordy Shipmates, by Sara Vowell. Who knew that a book about the Puritans could be so hilarious?

Best Book of the Year
The competition was fierce for this one. I read a lot of enjoyable stuff this year, but only two really blew me away: Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. They both moved me like nobody's business, but only one could come out on top. And the Bookie goes to...

...The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao! I think the epic nature of the book gave it the edge over Tropper's funny, wrenching, fabulous novel. Diaz's book just killed me dead. That is all.

Meet me at the afterparty for champagne with Diddy, and look out for the Suckies.

So behind, but who cares?

So my plan to blog about every single book I read this year has clearly, as my mother's former coworker would say, fallen by the waistline. Some books, like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, were hard to write about due to their sheer awesomeness. How do you write about such an amazing book? It has catapulted onto my list of all-time favorites, and I know I'll come back to it again and again. Some books, on the other hand, are guilty pleasures that I really don't feel like admitting to the world that I read. Some aren't even pleasure; they're just guilty. It just shows the mix of crap and gold that is my literary diet. It's like foie gras and Hamburger Helper. (And, yeah, the Ulysses thing was a total nonstarter. I still haven't returned it to the library, though.)

Anyway, I'm trying to get back on track, so here are the memorable things I've read recently:

• The aforementioned Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: I read his short-story collection, Drown, in my Latino lit class, and it was okay. Nothing against Diaz; I'm just not the biggest fan of short stories. I want a big fat novel that I can really get into and stick with. (Into which I can really get, and with which I can stick.) The buzz on Wao was so overwhelming that I had to give it a shot, and thank God I did. This book is so good that it turns me into one of those inane chicks from the yogurt commercial: "It's massage good. It's snow day good." I love the characters; I love the voice. It's just bloody amazing, and everyone in the world should read it. The descriptions of the characters are brilliant; this one, about Belicia, really stuck with me:

"Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boycrazy. (To be called boycrazy in Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.)" (Diaz 88)

• Hungry, by Crystal Renn and Marjorie Ingall: Yes, I was intrigued by the idea of Renn's transformation from anorexic wannabe to zaftig goddess, but when I learned that Margie Ingall (from Sassy!!!) was the cowriter, I really got on board. I loved the book, and I came away from it with a ton of respect for Renn. It's incredible that, at such a young age, she was so determined to be herself and blaze a trail for others. This is a book that will make you feel good about yourself. I beat myself up over my weight for years, when honestly, it was never that much of an issue. I look at pictures of myself in high school, when I thought I was so disgusting-looking that no one would ever love me, and it makes me want to scream. If I could have had a role model like Crystal Renn back then, it would have made a huge difference. I'm so glad that my daughter will be able to read her story in those crucial years. Even if you think that a model's story could never be your thing, give this book a chance. Renn is smart and funny (once describing her typical lunch as "lettuce with a side of batshit"), and she gives a lot of insight into modeling. Turns out there's more to it than just standing there and looking bitchy!

Right now I'm reading The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. So far it's great; more later.

The Second Coming, plus an addition to my Must List

I will admit that I am terrible about declaring a book amazing and wonderful based on a good first chapter or so. Oftentimes the rest of the book doesn't merit the gushing I did about the beginning, and I feel bad about recommending it to everyone I know. However, I refuse to believe that this is the case with Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You. Holy crap, this book is amazing. The way Tropper writes is better than just about anything I have ever encountered. Of course, I am only on page 44, but I don't think I've ever read a better 44 pages. I've heard critics describe a book as searing, but I've never thought that myself until I read Tropper's description of Judd Foxman walking in on his wife in bed with his boss. The entire chapter is wrenching and heartbreaking, but also laugh-out-loud funny in places. Chapter 3 begins, "My marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake." Please read it so you can find out the purpose for the cheesecake (heartbreaking) and where it ended up (hilarious). Also: flaming testicles. What more can I say?

[Here's what more I can say: Judd's brother is described as "the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead" (Tropper 4).]

Oh, and my Must List: I have to add Hoyt from True Blood. On a show that often goes too far for me (Bill and Lorena's '20s tryst? Gag, vomit, shudder), his sweet manner with Jessica is a nice counterbalance. His relationship with his wicked-witch mother is great, too. I loved the scene in the last episode in which he goes through the laundry list of everyone she hates: "You hate African Americans!" "Shh! That's a secret!" I almost fell off the couch.

Catching up, yet again

It's a red-letter day: I picked up three books I had requested at the library today. Yay! So my reading menu in the next couple of weeks will include Jennifer Weiner's Best Friends Forever (Weiner is the queen of brainy-yet-breezy chick lit), Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You (good buzz on that one), and Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society (a kid's book, but it seems interesting). In addition to those, my fantastic almost-lawyer friend lent me Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize winner) and Jen Lancaster's Bright Lights, Big Ass (doesn't the title just say it all?). I'm thrilled to have a packed shelf, but this means that my Ulysses project might have to fall by the waistline (as a former colleague of my mother's would say). I still want to read it a bit at a time (unless it just grabs me and I can't put it down), but with so much highly anticipated reading at my fingertips, I just don't know how that's going to work out. I'm still going to read it, though--I mean it!

Wow, I think I OD'd on parentheses in that last paragraph. (Such a shame.) Anyway, I've finished the following books in the last week or so:

• Miss Harper Can Do It, by Jane Berentson: As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of this book is fan-freaking-tastic. Annie Harper is a young elementary school teacher who is attempting to write a memoir during her boyfriend's deployment. Her voice is so engaging, and I could really relate to her. She does not feel like an army girlfriend; I never really felt like an army wife. On p. 8, she describes the day that David, her boyfriend, left:

"That morning there had been this big flag-waving, yellow-ribbon, send-off hoopla. I hated it. I hated the other women waving yellow ribbons and white handkerchiefs. Actual cloth handkerchiefs! Who even uses those anymore?"

When Mark left for Iraq, I went through something similar. Someone was walking around passing out tiny flags, and I remember thinking, "Please don't give me one of those." I'm just not a flag waver. Anyway, I could see that Annie and I had a lot in common. As the book continues, though, it takes a turn toward the conventional. It's still enjoyable, but it doesn't live up to the promise of the first half of the book.

• In Her Own Sweet Time, by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt: This is part-journalism, part-memoir detailing Lehmann-Haupt's quest for possible motherhood. Definitely interesting, and it gives you a lot to think about. For example, Dr. Eleonora Porcu, the Italian doctor who pioneered egg-freezing technology, doesn't feel that women should actually use it. She believes that society should change to allow women to have children young without derailing their careers. Like I said, interesting. However, like that supermom/slacker mom book I wrote about a while back, it really details a problem mostly encountered by the affluent.
• Twenties Girl, by Sophie Kinsella: It's still summer--don't judge me!

A challenge (to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!)

According to the inimitable Mark Twain (actually, he is imitable, since Hal Holbrooke's been doing it for decades, but--already!--I digress), "A classic is something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read." I laughed when I first saw that quotation, because I had recently had that exact thought about James Joyce's Ulysses. I really want to be a person who has read it, but I've never necessarily wanted to put in the work to make that happen. Well, I have decided that, no matter how long it takes or how crazy it drives me, I am going to be a person who has read Ulysses. My attitude toward this project can be summed up by those inspirational words from the other "Ulysses," hence the title of this post. I am not going to yield, no matter how loopy the stream-of-consciousness narration gets, and I will post here about the experience.

So far, I have checked the book out of the library. I'm afraid the easy part is over.

My poor neglected blog

You would think that summer would be the perfect time to catch up on my blog, and yet that has not been the case. I have been reading like a fiend, but I've been too sorry to write about it. Oh, well. Just for the sake of keeping tabs, this is what I've read lately:

• The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters: A good read, but I got really frustrated with the main character.
• Heart and Soul, by Mave Binchy: I love Maeve Binchy! She's probably my favorite guilty pleasure author. There's something so comforting about her books, and I love how everyone is always "mad" or "desperate."
• The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff: My Big Love addiction leads me to read anything I can about polygamy and the FLDS. See, TV is not bad for you.
• The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros: I assigned it to my students for summer reading, so I figured I should read it myself.
• The Mating Habits of the North American WASP, by Lauren Lipton: Chick lit at its finest. I seriously did have a hard time putting it down; not much got done the day I read this.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (like I needed to tell you that): I just saw The Half-Blood Prince, and I couldn't remember what came next. It was my first re-read of a Harry Potter book, and it turns out they are just as addictive the second time around.
• Living La Vida Lola, by Misa Ramirez: I read Janet Evanovich. Misa Ramirez, you're no Janet Evanovich.
• The Local News, by Miriam Gershow: A high school student deals with her brother's disappearance. This is all complicated by the fact that she doesn't really like her brother.
• Miss Harper Can Do It, by Jane Berentson: I just started it this morning, and already I am in love. The main character is me. Can't wait to read more!

I think that's it. I've been doing a horrible job of keeping track.