Meg Wolitzer Defies Logic

I read a short piece recently that said that Jennifer Egan was reading Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling and liking it very much. Using my High School Logic background I concluded that since I liked Jennifer Egan I would tend to like Meg Wollitzer. Since Logic was the only form of Mathematics I ever truly enjoyed or got an A in I was shocked to discover that my conclusion was faulty. I do not like Meg Wolitzer, or more precisely, her book. Of course this was before I partially read the Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan that I decided I did not like either so maybe I will not have to give back my A. Just give up on those two.

Betrayed by Tessa Hadley, the Novelist

Shock! I didn't like The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley----I read and read and never actually could care about any of the characters. Her short stories are perfect gems but she can not sustain a whole novel, if this is any indication. It dragged on and on. I feel betrayed.

Another betrayal: I also read most of Jennifer Egan's Invisible Circus and was uninterested throughout. That was her first novel I believe. 

I am a broken woman.

Don't Say Her Name

The Wave, the piece Francisco Goldman wrote about his much younger Mexican wife Aura Estrada's death in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico, was a small masterpiece. It was powerful and mysterious enough that I decided to buy the book, Say Her Name. The short piece was excerpted from the book and I was left wanting to know more. Alas, now I do know more, and I rather I didn't.

Aura comes across as vain, pretentious and needy. She marries Goldman, she makes him dye his hair for the over the top wedding while all the time protesting she'd rather get married at City Hall, she belittles him constantly . Goldman comes across as pathetically and foolishly besotted by her. They were only married for two years, together for four, and you know that she would have left him sooner rather than later for someone less slavishly adoring and much younger. She doesn't let him drop her off at graduate school because she doesn't want the other students to see she is with such an old man. She regularly tells him how ugly he is "Que feo estas." and how lucky he is to have her. He innocently finds this charming.

He even includes her dreadful writing fragments to show how 'wonderful' she really was. In his quest to keep her he runs up enormous credit card debt while he finds after her death that she had squirreled away quite a sizable separate savings account on her own. Just when you start feeling sorry for him in his widower status though (he has an altar in their apartment to her with her wedding dress still hanging there!) he starts sleeping with all her old friends and you lose sympathy. He whines and wallows in his grief and at some point you want to say "Have some dignity!'.

I will concede that he is very honest in his writing but it did not improve in an elongated book form. If he had just left it to the size of The Wave he would have kept his dignity and hers, as it is he did both himself and Aura a disservice by being so honest. Best not say her name anymore.

Something About a Herring

This is another Flavia de Luce mystery. Not great but quite adequate. I read it and then I was not reading it.  End of story.

My Secret Weapon

What do I owe my recent surge in reading level to? How did I get through so many books in the last few months? The answer is simple, my new found love, my bus. One hour and 15 minutes there and one hour and 15 minutes back.....

The Emerald Atlas

In an effort to find something to replace Olivia's mourning for Philip Pullman's Dark Materials  and her dismissiveness of anything not the Golden Compass I have been trying to tempt her with other stories. This book is on a quest, as is every other current kid's book; a Quest To Be The Next Harry Potter. While it falls short of this noble goal, it's ok, but slightly hollow.

The obligatory magical world does not feel fully realized as HP or the Golden Compass. It's as if the waterfall you see them jumping over in the cover above is a green screen and all the action takes place in a Hollywood stage lot. But who knows, she might like it when she stops taking the quiz online to find out what animal form her daemon would take. Apparently hers is a pinemartin and mine is a hummingbird.....ahhh...she's right! Nothing beats the Golden Compass!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This was a quick read and quite engaging. It's the story of some eternally replicating cancer cells harvested from a poor black woman called Henrietta Lacks who was dying of cancer. It raises interesting ethical questions about our ownership of our bodies,tissues, organs, cells. I don't think there are any easy answers. The children of Henrietta Lacks whose cells were used in cures for multiple diseases are poor and health insurance-less,  incapable of paying for any of the medicines or treatments that their mother's cells helped discover. But the author also questions what if those cells had come with informed consent, the red tape and complications of using them would have completely halted most of the research. Should her cells be like music with royalties paid each time someone plays a song? No easy answers but some good questions.