Life Itself

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert

pages: 415
publication date: 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-58497-5

I was late to learn about the rich and varied life led by film critic Roger Ebert. Of course I was familiar with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system he created with Gene Siskel to rate movies. But beyond that, I didn’t know much. I didn’t know about his extensive body of written work. I also didn’t know that his bout with cancer in 2006 left him unable to speak, eat, or drink. After he passed away in April of this year, the Internet was brimming with tributes and memorials about Ebert. Many of these contained excerpts from his memoir, Life Itself. The excerpts were always winsome and charming. So I decided to pick up his memoir and read it in full. (By the way, although the subtitle of Life Itself is “A Memoir,” the book reads more like an autobiography than a memoir.)

Although the excerpts I had read were captivating and inviting, the book as a whole fell somewhat flat. First of all, Ebert was an unabashed list-er. He listed everything from the TV shows he watched with his father to people he interviewed and later became friends with. And if Ebert was a consummate lister, I am a consummate list-skimmer. So, whenever a passage contained a list, my mind went on auto-pilot until I noticed that blessed serial comma and focused on Ebert’s writing again. Also, the book contained a lot of material about celebrities and other members of the Hollywood crowd. Many of the people Ebert discussed I had never heard of, but even when I had, I didn’t really care that they drank Heinekens or had mommy issues. These incidental details would give Life Itself a sodden, plodding feel.

The book was at its best during the chapters when Ebert described his own life and feelings. In the first chapter, Ebert is describing his childhood home and running up and down the hallway from the living room to his bedroom. The passage is personal, yet universal. Ebert explains that he returned to his childhood home years later and “saw that the hallway was only a few yards long. I got the feeling I sometimes have when reality realigns itself. It’s a tingling sensation moving like a wave through my body. I know the feeling precisely.” In another similarly satisfying passage, Ebert is discussing the conversations he has with an old friend. Ebert says, “Our conversations all take place in the present tense. We are always meeting for the first time. When you’re young you don’t realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older.” The passages like these – the personal, reflective, inquisitive passages – were what gave the book life and wonder.

Life Itself has a lot to offer. Readers who are movie buffs, fans of Ebert, or who enjoy reading about celebrities will find a lot to love in the pages of Life Itself. And Ebert’s prose is often bright and funny. As someone who seemingly lived a life full of travel, melancholy, love, and adventure, Ebert had a lot of wisdom to impart to anyone willing to read his works.

4/6: worth reading

other reviews:

Entertainment Weekly
National Post
npr

The Host

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

pages: 578 (including back matter)
publication date: 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-12865-0

When I realized that Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight saga, had written another book, I went directly to amazon.com to preview the book. I got about one paragraph into the preview and I read this sentence: “With the truest instinct of my kind, I’d bound myself securely into the body’s center of thought, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex until it was no longer a separate entity. It was me.” Oh my gosh, I thought, it’s just Yeerks; this book is just Twilight but with Yeerks. Immediately, I stopped previewing because I knew I would have to read The Host in its entirety.

And although The Host was not as good as either Twilight or Animorphs, it did share many of the same themes. Themes of love and identity, good and evil, although on a much smaller scale than the other two series. The book begins on Earth in the future, after parasitic creatures known as “souls” have taken over Earth except for a few rebel groups of humans. Wanderer, a soul, is implanted in a young rebel woman, Melanie. When Melanie was captured by the souls, she left behind her brother, Jamie, and a young man, Jared. Because Melanie has people to fight for, she resists Wanderer’s attempts to fully assimilate into Melanie’s body. As Melanie’s consciousness and emotions become more and more prominent, Wanderer begins to sympathize with her. Eventually, Melanie convinces Wanderer to go search for the remaining humans, including Jamie and Jared. And, because this book was written by Stephenie Meyer, a love triangle develops.

The best parts of the book were when Meyer used the interesting plot line to write curious passages about identity and the self. There are entire scenes where Wanderer and Melanie first share a single consciousness, only for it to splinter apart and then shift between Wanderer and Melanie. And all this from Wanderer’s point of view. If I specified much further, I would give some plot lines away, but, as a small example, at one point, Wanderer, in Melanie’s body, states, “I remembered what it felt like to vomit, though I never had.”

Additionally, Meyer was able to create some very compelling suspense. I worried about how Wanderer and Melanie could both survive, how they both could live with their respective love interests, whether the souls would find the rebel humans, whether the various rebel attacks against the souls would succeed and almost every other plot line Meyer concocted. The only aspect of The Host that was not compelling was the love triangle, because it was formulaic and predictable.

The Host also shares some of the failings of the Twilight saga. For example, Wanderer/Melanie is constantly and unnecessarily getting carried by men, often as she is telling them “no.” Additionally, Wanderer encounters not a single black person – not a single one through 561 pages of story. But for all her faults, Meyer, in The Host and the Twilight saga, knows how to craft a good story.

4/6: worth reading

Some other reviews of the book:

Entertainment Weekly
The Guardian
The Obsessive Reader

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England by Sharon Marcus

publication date: 2007
pages (not including notes and index): 262
ISBN-10: 0-691-12835-9
ISBN-13: 978-691-12835-1

Between Women theorizes that our notions about Victorian England women are incomplete. According to Sharon Marcus, the author, our current perceptions of women of that era are two-fold: either women were subservient beings who lived for their husbands or they were repressed creatures whose natural tendencies were exposed in secret lesbian relationships. As explained by Marcus, the reality was much more complex, because Victorian women were allowed, and even encouraged, to forge deep friendships with other women, to objectify women through fashion, and to live with another woman in same-sex relationships. I found Between Women to be on an interesting topic, but I would have been better-served by reading a short synopsis or a long article on the subject. When I selected this book, I got in over my head with reading 264 pages of analysis of Victorian writings.

The book is separated into three parts. Part One, titled “Elastic Ideals: Female Friendship,” introduces Marcus’s idea that “Victorian society, in which marriage between men and women was a supreme value, did not suppress bonds between women but actively promoted them.” In Part One, Marcus explored the deep friendships women would forge at that time. Her discussion is very thorough. She introduces diaries and letters from dozens of women. Some of the excerpts can seem erotic or even sexual. As one example, when Caroline Clive met her sister-in-law Caroline Norton, she wrote in correspondence that Norton was a “perfect beauty, eyes with long eye-lashes on both lids, the lower touching her cheek, a mouth that opens in a way like ideal mouths . . . lovely skin and shape, a flowing, glowing silk gown and cashmere shawl edged with gold.” Although this might sound intense to modern readers, Marcus concluded that Victorian ideas about female friendship allowed for longing and adoration between friends. In Part One, Marcus also explored female friendship in novels of the time, including David Copperfield and Villette. Part One was intriguing because it dispelled my impressions of Victorian women and their ability to express themselves.

Part Two was titled “Mobile Objects: Female Desire.” In Part Two, Marcus concluded that fashion images scrutinized by women and dolls that were played with by girls allowed women to experience things otherwise unknown to them. As explained by Marcus: images of fashion in magazines “were popular because women who wanted to turn themselves into spectacles of femininity took pleasure in looking at images that reduced women to lovely bodies filling out beautiful clothing.” In this section, Marcus included 20 fashion images from Victorian England, which made for a very fun chapter. Additionally, dolls allowed girls to act with aggression or dominance. In the last chapter of Part Two, Marcus spent a great deal of time critically reading Great Expectations. This was my favorite part of the book. Marcus’s discussion of Great Expectations was engaging and convincing.

The third and final part of the book was titled “Plastic Institutions: Female Marriage.” In Part Three, Marcus discussed female marriage. First, she contrasted female marriage with male-female marriage of the time because female marriage was necessarily based on contract and was dissoluble. Next, she asserted that female marriage was familiar to middle-class Victorians. Third, she concluded that the Victorian experience with contractual and dissoluble same-sex marriage led to marriage reform for all women, including expanded property and divorce rights.

As mentioned above, I found the topic interesting. However, the book could be dry and dense. Also, as someone who is not a literature or history expert, there were several terms and references that I didn’t understand. I’m glad a read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you already have an interest in the topic.

3/6: more good than bad

P.S. Here is a lively interview with the author: The Hooded Utilitarian

Also, here are some other reviews of Between Women:

H-Net
Booked All Week
goodreads

Mrs. Bridge

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

publication date: 1959
pages: 246
ISBN: 0-86547-056-1

I was just reading an article about authors writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. The author generally believed that men had a difficult time writing women characters. I was reminded of this article as I was reading Mrs. Bridge because, contrary to what had been said in the article, Evan S. Connell created a complex and realistic female narrator.

Mrs. Bridge follows the life of India Bridge, from her engagement until her children are grown and have left the house. And the portrait of Mrs. Bridge provided by Connell is possibly the most accurate rendering of an individual’s life I have ever read. Intriguingly, although the portrait of Mrs. Bridge is complete, the book is not long. Instead, Mrs. Bridge is composed of many short chapters with names like “Voting” and “One Summer Morning.” These vignettes portray Mrs. Bridge completely because they emulate life’s moments: many are seemingly irrelevant, some are frightening, others are routine or exciting.

Not only is Connell’s depiction of Mrs. Bridge’s life complete in its arbitrariness, it is accurate in its tragedy and absurdity. Connell gets underneath the sheen of Mrs. Bridge’s upper-middle-class American life in the 1940s and shows how rigid and isolating such a life could be for a woman. Connell describes Mrs. Bridge’s feelings of malaise and aimlessness as those “moments when this anonymous evil had erupted and left as its only cicatrice a sour taste in the mouth and a wild, wild desire.” Although the book devastatingly describes the tedium and seeming insignificance experienced by Mrs. Bridge, her life is not a tedious or insignificant one. The book is punctuated by humor and times of love and affection.

The other characters in Mrs. Bridge are realistic, penetrating, and often endearing. For example, the workaholic Mr. Bridge, sensing that his family misses him “would redouble his efforts at the office in order to give them everything they wanted.” Connell also creates authentic portraits of the Bridge children: Ruth, Carolyn, and Douglas. Connell especially captures the complicated nature of parent-child relationships. For example, when Ruth is leaving for New York City to live on her own Mrs. Bridge is worrying about her and reflecting on their own contentious relationship. However, Mrs. Bridge, for the first time, notices the relationship between Ruth and her father and is “struck by their easy companionship, as though they had gotten to know each other quite well when she was not around.” In just one scene, Connell so effortlessly lays bare a common, yet heartbreaking, occurrence that happens in families everywhere.

In Mrs. Bridge, Connell captures what it is to be human, with all its attendant absurdity, tragedy, humor, loneliness, happiness, and everyday sorrow.

5/6: seek this book out

More reviews of Mrs. Bridge:

npr
the guardian
Asylum

Why We Broke Up

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

Powell’s Books

publication date: 2011
pages: 368
ISBN-10: 0316127256
ISBN-13: 978-0316127257

Why We Broke Up is enjoyable not because of its plot, which is a standard “young-girl-meets-young-boy-and-hearts-are-broken” storyline, but because of its concept, theme, and characters. It is these things that give the book life and interest.

In Why We Broke Up, Min Green, a junior in high school who aspires to be a film director, is writing a letter to her ex-boyfriend Ed Slaterton, a jocky, popular senior. The letter is a chronicle of their relationship. This concept allows Handler to use both first- and second-person narrative. The use of these narratives effectively transported me into the middle of Min and Ed’s story. For example, I felt it when Min, in a fit of jealousy, danced with her ex-boyfriend in front of Ed. As I was reading that scene, I had to put the book down. I was so embarrassed for everyone involved. Handler’s use of first- and second-person made scenes like that deeply vivid and evocative.

Also, as mentioned above, the book had an alluring theme. One of the themes of the book was the effect objects have on our mood and memory. As Min is writing her letter to Ed, she is sifting through a box of things she kept that reminded her of Ed and their relationship. Each time she examines a new object, a flood of memories surges into her mind. That is an accurate depiction of how I interact with objects. Even as I look around my living room, I am reminded. I see our PlayStation 3 and I think of the look on my boyfriend’s face when I gave it to him for his birthday. I see my collection of Animorphs books and I think of my fifth-grade best friend’s bedroom with all her horse posters. Min’s physical examination of the objects paralleled the emotional examination we all make when we are sorting through our past.

The third reason Why We Broke Up was a compelling read was the characters. Notwithstanding the Juno-esque, too-cool-for-school dialogue, the characters were very realistic. I felt like I knew an Ed, a Min, and an Al, Min’s “is he or isn’t he?” best friend. The realism of the characters made me interested in their stories and dramas.

However, as alluded to above, Why We Broke Up is not perfect. The dialogue is often cheesy and too-too. For example, Ed’s college-age sister Joan says this when Min offers to help her cook dinner: “All my life, Min, for eons I have waited for someone to ask that question. I hope you agree that aprons are useless, but here, take this.” and hands Min a rubber band for her hair. That sentence was clearly meant to impart so much: Joan is a young person who cooks – how quirky. She doesn’t like aprons – how fresh. She puts great emphasis on temporal words – how . . . cute? Unfortunately, much of the dialogue was that way.

Additionally, I wasn’t swept up in all Min’s emotions. I suppose its because its been almost a decade since high school, but I didn’t experience as a reader the vexations Min was feeling concerning losing her virginity, love triangles, and the boredom and woe that is adolescence. Although I couldn’t completely empathize with Min, I did reflect on my own life as I was reading, which is always a good exercise.

4/6: worth reading

Here are some more reviews of the book:

The Telegraph
goodreads
USA Today

The Force of Reason

Powell’s Books

The Force of Reason by Oriana Fallaci

publication date: 2006
pages: 307
ISBN-10: 0-8478-2753-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-2753-4

I so much did not want to write a negative review of The Force of Reason because it is too easy. It’s like making fun of Nickelback. But, unfortunately, this book simply was not very good. I discovered it when I came across Brendan Bernhard’s review of it on the website for Powell’s Books. Bernhard describes the book as an attempt to answer certain questions about the influx of Muslims and the Islamic culture into Europe. In his review, Bernhard bestows moderate praise on the book and Oriana Fallaci, who was Italian (she died of breast cancer in late 2006). He describes the book as “riveting firsthand reportage” and calls Fallaci “a world-class journalist.” When I read the review, I thought, “Wow, this book must be really good and quite balanced for this reviewer to discuss it so positively even though it is about an obviously controversial topic. Sounds interesting.” It was not.

The book has many, many problems. In general, it is not convincing. First of all, Fallaci does not actually state any sort of thesis. It is clear she dislikes Muslims, but beyond that I don’t know what her point is. Second, even if she had a thesis, she doesn’t support it with any logic or, ironically, reason. Her only points are that Islam has a history of violent conquest and there are a lot of Muslims in Europe. What that proves, I don’t know.

Additionally, there are numerous small flaws with The Force of Reason. As Fallaci mentions at the beginning, she translated the English version and maintained “a punctuation and lexical choice and above all a sentence structure which reflects or repeats my way of writing in Italian.” This results in some awkward phrasing, such as the sentence: “That scream of pain which the Fra’ Accursios defined as impious, profane, indecent, abject, a book opposite to orthodox faith, an iniquity written on the Devil’s suggestion and infected by the most pernicious heresy.” And the simile: “like sardines in a can of sardines.”

The sardines line is not an anomaly: The Force of Reason contains several small-scale metaphors or explanations that simply are unsatisfactory. For example, in a passage that Fallaci describes as a letter to pacifists, Fallaci explains to the reader what war really is. Not only does war include human-on-human combat, it includes soccer and “when a lion pursues a gazelle” and “when weeds invade a cornfield.” Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the concept of “war” includes dinner on the African savannah and minor agricultural issues.

Also, the book is almost devoid of cites. If an author wants to convince me of something, especially using empirical evidence as Fallaci attempts to, I’m going to need some cites. In fact, the first cite does not arrive until page 19 and it is a cite to The Bible! (Fallaci often appeals to Christian readership and sensibilities, although she claims to be an atheist who detests Christianity.)

I did discover at least one valuable thing about the book. Toward the end, Fallaci graphically compares female genital mutilation to castration. That is an effective comparison because it emphasizes, especially to men, how life-changing and devastating such a procedure is. That is not a comparison I had thought of before, so I appreciated the observation.

As a caveat, I did not finish this book. I read the main text and then got about 15 pages into the 66-page epilogue before I gave up. Maybe the rest of the epilogue was inspiring and convincing and I just missed it.

1/6: couldn’t finish

Here are other reviews of the book:

National Review
The Constructive Curmudgeon
goodreads

Cannery Row

Powell’s Books

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

publication date: 1945
pages: 196
ISBN-10: 0140177388

I am in a book club with some co-workers and Cannery Row was our latest book club selection. It was a fun choice because I could feel literary, but without having to read Grapes of Wrath. I generally enjoy the Steinbeck novels I have read in the past, especially The Pearl and The Winter of Our Discontent.

I can add Cannery Row to the list of Steinbeck novels I enjoyed. (Although now that I’m thinking about it, I will probably never read any of them again. Oh well!) Cannery Row was not an “epic Steinbeck,” like Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden. Instead, it was a collection of related vignettes presented in novel form. The plot is almost non-existent. The main story arc revolves around the preparations for a party. However, the strength of this book does not come from the plot but from the characters and Steinbeck’s punchy writing style.

The relationship I had with the characters in this book was odd. I did not find any of them believable. No one I know or have ever meet spoke or thought like any of the characters. For example, two characters, Hazel and Doc, are at the beach and they notice some stink bugs. Hazel asks Doc what he thinks the reason stink bugs have “their asses up in the air for.” The rest of the dialogue goes like this:

“I think they’re praying.”
“What!”
“The remarkable thing isn’t that they put their tails up in the air – the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying – so maybe they’re praying.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Who talks like that?! No one. I did find it endearing, though. Even though I didn’t understand what in the heck Hazel and Doc were talking about, I liked them. And I wanted to know what would happen to them and make sure they would be alright. Steinbeck presents many characters just like that. I can’t say that I relate to them, but each of them does have a humanness that makes them likable.

Additionally, Steinbeck clearly has a love for his characters and for the setting. Cannery Row is set in a poor California coastal town. The book includes several passages earnestly describing the buildings, topography, and inhabitants of the town. The most effective of these passages are those that describe the sea. For example: “Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly.”

Like much of Steinbeck’s work, the book is also peppered with what my high school English teacher called “everyman chapters.” These are the chapters that are related to what is happening in the book but don’t actually involve any of the characters or move the plot along. The everyman chapters showcase Steinbeck’s ability to present the human experience. In one such passage, Steinbeck discusses how no one believes in omens or superstitions. “But it doesn’t do any good to take chances with them and no one takes chances. Cannery Row, like every place else, is not superstitious but will not walk under a ladder or open an umbrella in the house . . . . most people in Cannery Row simply do not believe in such things and then live by them.” That passage shows Steinbeck at his finest: the ability to get to the very center of something that normally escapes our notice.

In conclusion, the characters weren’t identifiable but I liked them. And the plot was trivial but I was interested. And the chapters didn’t have much to do with the rest of the book but seemed relevant. I guess that’s the magic of Steinbeck!

4/6: worth reading

Some other reviews of the book:

Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Doug Brown at Powell’s Books
A Boy and His Books