Tag: books (Page 5 of 7)

Book review Monday: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

July 15, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

Your long-awaited Book Review Monday is finally here, and is coming to you from Le Pain Quotidien in Notting Hill, London, where I am sitting with a really expensive iced coffee, a sparkling water, and the remains of a really good (but again, really expensive) salmon salad. London, turns out, is expensive. But lovely! I am so happy to be here. Anyway, last night I finally finished a book that I’ve been slowly making my way through for lo these many (read: two) weeks, The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.

The Historian had been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time, and I can’t remember where I got it or why I bought it, but I think maybe my mom had recommended it to me? In any case, I had been avoiding it, because it was a ginormous paperback about vampires, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. But finally, a few weeks ago, I picked it up and began to read and was pleasantly surprised. The Historian is not your Twilight-style, sexy vampire story. It’s actually about Dracula — the original vampire — and the havoc he wreaks on the lives of several historians over several generations. The story is told from two perspectives: the principal narrator, a woman who is never named, tells a story that happened when she was a teenager in the 1970s, during which time she discovers the writings of her father, which relate a story that happened to him twenty-some years earlier, in the 1950s. The book switches back and forth between the two narratives, but mostly follows the earlier story of the narrator’s father, Paul, and his companion, Helen, as they try to chase down the body of Vlad Tepes (aka Dracula) so they can put a stake through his heart and stop him from continuing his nefarious deeds (mostly, turning people into vampires). Turns out, Dracula is still alive (sort of) and well, going about his business and building an army of the undead (many of whom happen to be historians or librarians who study Dracula and learn too much). The problem is, no one knows where his tomb is, so Paul and Helen must figure it out by traveling through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, visiting monasteries and libraries, conferring with academics, and doing some good old fashioned grave robbing (or, at least, grave disturbing). It doesn’t spoil anything to tell you that the book ends with a showdown between the historians and Dracula himself.

This book was mostly an enjoyable read, but definitely dragged occasionally. One gets the sense that Kostova herself is a historian, or at least some sort of academic, because she finds it hard to resist packing the narrative with historical, factual detail, often at the expense of pacing. There were actually points during the book that I had to skim entire pages of dry historical background on various Dracula lore, and found myself wishing that Kostova had written a slimmer, quicker paced book. All of this was made more disappointing by what felt, to me, like a quite anticlimactic ending to the book (despite the aforementioned Dracula showdown). I also felt that the characters were not entirely relatable/well-developed, and two of the secondary characters, both elderly gentlemen, were essentially interchangeable with each other. The characters lacked some essential spice that would have made them stand out in the reader’s memory, or cause the reader to root for them.

However, the writing is very good, and I enjoyed the detail-rich descriptions of cities like Sofia, Istanbul, Budapest, and Bucharest. Kostova also has a particular gift for describing meals. I love it when a book tells you what the characters are eating, particularly when the characters are in exotic settings. My stomach especially rumbled when Paul and Helen sat down to burek in Istanbul. I love burek so much.

I’d recommend The Historian for anyone looking for a fresh take on an ancient vampire legend and people with an interest in history and/or who enjoy historians and academics as protagonists. It’s a long, slow read, though, so don’t expect to charge through it in a day, and it can be quite dry. If you’re looking for an addictive page-turner, this is not the book for you.

Book review Monday: Two okay books by two good authors

July 1, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

I’m in the odd position this week of having read a bunch of books since I last blogged, but no books that I’m super jazzed about. Normally, I read several books at a time and am usually pretty excited by at least one of them. But over the past few weeks, I’ve read a couple of books that were just ‘meh,’ which is disappointing. Now, however, I’ve started a couple of new ones that have me hooked (Stephen King’s The Stand, for one, and Elisabeth Kostova’s The Historian — more on those in the coming weeks). So, today I figure I’ll do two mini reviews of two mediocre-to-decent books I’ve read recently: Juliet Naked, by Nick Hornby, and Affinity, by Sarah Waters. The funny thing is, these are both authors whose other books I’ve enjoyed greatly. But even the greats have their off days, I suppose.

Let’s start with Affinity. I read Sarah Waters’ 2009 ghost story The Little Stranger a few months ago and really enjoyed it, so I figured her second novel, Affinity, would also be a good bet. Most of Waters’ books (with the exception of The Little Stranger) take place in the Victorian era, and most involve lesbian characters. Affinity focuses on the world of Victorian spiritualism (seances and dark meetings and so on). The plot revolves around two women: Selina Dawes, a spirit medium, and Margaret Prior, an upper-class lady who frequently visits a women’s prison. Miss Prior’s reasons for visiting the women’s prison are never really fleshed out, but it has something to do with wanting to have a pastime and get out of the house, since she once tried to kill herself, she’s still mourning her father’s death, and is generally Not Well. While touring the prison, Miss Prior meets Dawes, who’s serving time for a mishap that occurred during one of her seances that resulted in the death of her patron, an older lady, and the injury of a young girl. Miss Prior becomes fascinated with Dawes and the two develop an “affinity” with each other. Prior becomes convinced that Dawes is her spiritual and romantic other half and ends up going to great lengths to help her, ultimately to Miss Prior’s own detriment.

Without giving anything away, I can tell you that there is a twist in the book, and I kinda saw it coming from a mile away. I didn’t anticipate the precise twist, but its general shape was not a huge surprise. When I finished the book, I was left with the feeling that Waters had pulled a bit of a cheap party trick on her readers, much like a Victorian spirit medium leading a seance. The plot buildup of the book was much too slow to justify the weakness of the final twist. I wasn’t impressed. Maybe from now on I’ll stick with Waters’ books that have actually been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (The Little Stranger, The Night Watch, Fingersmith).

Now, moving on to Nick Hornby’s Juliet Naked. First, I should point out that I am a big Nick Hornby fan. Some of his books have made truly lasting impressions on me (About a Boy, A Long Way Down, How to Be Good, Slam), and I love his writing style. My friend Yohanca and I once had a discussion about why we like Nick Hornby and our conclusion was that his writing feels comfortable and familiar, like you’re wrapped in a warm blanket, while still being lively and witty. His writing, in other words, is like a Slanket. And how can you go wrong with a Slanket? I don’t know, but Juliet Naked did not totally work for me. The story is about an English couple, Annie and Duncan, who are not miserable, necessarily, but who aren’t happy, either. They’ve been together for a long time and Annie has become bored and annoyed with Duncan’s nearly all-consuming obsession with an American musician, the fictional Tucker Crowe. Crowe disappeared suddenly off the music scene twenty years earlier and is believed to be a hermit, living off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, but he still has a rabid fan-base online, mostly made up of nerdy, socially challenged men like Duncan. When Duncan gets his hands on a pared down/acoustic version of one of Crowe’s most famous albums, Juliet, Annie and Duncan are brought into sharp conflict over their disparate reactions to it (Duncan loves it; Annie thinks it’s crap). Annie writes a piece criticizing the album (the titular “Juliet Naked”) and posts it on the Tucker Crowe fan site where Duncan spends most of his free time, and, to her shock, Tucker Crowe responds. Thus, Annie and Tucker Crowe begin a strange friendship that morphs into a cautious romantic relationship when Tucker comes to England from America.

There are parts of the book that did work for me. For one thing, I think Hornby captured perfectly the online fan milieu in which many people operate, the separate and apart internet communities that people live their lives in, and the rules and customs and social hierarchies that spring up in those communities. I also liked the character of Annie and thought that both she and Duncan were well developed. Some of the descriptions of Annie’s unhappiness, and her worry that she wasted many years of her life with a man who was wrong for her, are pitch perfect. For instance, when Annie starts corresponding with Tucker, she tells him she’s worried she’s squandered fifteen years of her life with Duncan. He responds:

“First of all, you have to get that number down. Make a list of all the good books you’ve read, movies you’ve seen, conversations you’ve had and so on, and give all these things a temporal value. With a little bit of creative accounting, you should be able to reduce it to ten. I’ve got mine down to about that now, although I’ve cheated here and there — I included the whole of my son Jackson’s life, for example, and he’s been at school and asleep for a lot of the time-wasting years.

I’d like to say that anything that comes in around a decade you can write off for tax purposes, but that isn’t actually the way I feel. I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not hte best sleeper. What can I tell you? If it really was wasted time — and I’d need to examine your diary pretty carefully before I could confirm that for you — then I have some bad news: it’s gone. You can maybe add a little onto the other end by giving up drugs, or cigarettes, or by going to the gym a lot, but my guess is that those years after the age of eighty aren’t as much fun as they’re cracked up to be.”

I love that.

For all that enjoyed about the book, however, I was left a bit cold by Hornby’s long descriptions of fictional pieces of music and the debates that the characters had over said pieces of imaginary music. I know from reading High Fidelity that Hornby takes his music seriously, but in my opinion, music commentary within a novel only works if the music is something one can actually listen to. Also, as a little nitpicky complaint, I found some of Tucker’s dialogue and speech patterns to be unmistakably British, even though the character is supposed to be American. You’d think Hornby could afford a great American editor to take a look-see and make sure the American characters aren’t saying “pip pip cheerio,” or whatever. Oh, well.

Neither of these books were bad, but neither were slam-dunks, either. If you’re looking to read Sarah Waters, check out The Little Stranger. And if you want a good introduction to Hornby, start with How to Be Good and go from there.

Book review Monday: Into the Abyss, by Carol Shaben

June 10, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately. In fact, I’ve been craving it. There’s just something about real stories with an impact on real human lives that’s been appealing to me more than fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I just finished a first draft of my second manuscript (huzzah!) and so I’ve been so immersed in my own brand of fiction that I’ve wanted a break from it when I sit down to read at night. In any case, over the last couple weeks, I’ve read Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s excellent Half The Sky, about the importance of ending the oppression of women worldwide, Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse, which I discussed last week, and, most recently, Carol Shaben’s Into the Abyss: An Extraordinary True Story, which tells the story of a plane crash in Canada in 1984 that killed six and left four survivors, including Shaben’s father, Larry.

Shaben, by interviewing her father and other survivors of the crash, managed to piece together the tragic story of Wapiti Flight 402, which crashed in the Canadian wilderness on October 19, 1984. The four survivors were Shaben’s father, Larry Shaben, a prominent Alberta politician, Erik Vogel, the pilot of the plane, Scott Deschamps, a young officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Paul Archambault, a criminal in Deschamps’ custody. The other six passengers, including another prominent Alberta politician, Grant Notley, perished. The commuter flight had been traveling from Edmonton, the provincial capital of Alberta, to High Prairie, Alberta, transporting people who worked in Edmonton (including Shaben and Notley, the other politician on the flight) to their homes.

In the book, Shaben explores the factors that led to the crash — including pilot exhaustion leading to a loss of situational awareness, plus Wapiti Aviation policies that forced pilots to “push” bad weather to stay on schedule, despite severe safety risks. Ultimately, the pilot of Wapiti 402 lost track of where he was as he was flying and became so confused he crashed the plane. Shaben explains:

Whether in aviation, mountain climbing or other high-risk scenarios, several factors can predispose individuals to lose situational awareness. Broadly, these factors are environmental, psychological and physiological. Erik experienced all three. Foul weather reduced his visual information to nil and severe icing had slowed his speed over ground to a degree that put him several miles further back from his destination than he’d estimated. Psychological factors — those imposing an additional processing load on the conscious brain — taxed Erik’s ability to determine his exact location using dead reckoning, and impaired his decision-making.

Shaben goes on to explain that Vogel simultaneously had to battle task saturation, during which he “needed to handle more information than his highly stressed brain could process” and fatigue, which contributed to his making an error in reckoning that led to him trying to land approximately 40 km outside of the airport. Considering Vogel’s fatigue plus the bad weather in which he was forced to fly, Wapiti Flight 402 had a high probability of crashing.

Shaben delves into the long night in the wilderness that the four survivors spent together and their struggle to stay alive in the brutal cold despite the lack of adequate firewood and serious injuries sustained by three out of four of them. Shaben tells each of the survivors’ stories: how they came to be aboard Wapiti Flight 402 in the first place, as well as their lives after the crash. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching story was that of Paul Archambault, the prisoner who was being transported from Edmonton back to High Prairie to go to court for his previous offenses. Archambault was, according to the other three survivors, a hero. He helped keep the other three men alive, even going back to the wreckage of the plane to rescue his police escort, Deschamps, from where he was trapped. After the crash and the survivors’ eventual rescue, Archambault tried to start his life over, giving up alcohol, holding down a steady job, and falling in love. But things eventually fell apart for him, and, in a twist of cruel irony, he died at age 33 of exposure in Grande Praire, Alberta, near a men’s shelter where he had been staying.

The thing about non-fiction is that the stories don’t always come out the way you want them to. If the story of the crash of Wapiti 402 had been a work of fiction, miracles would have happened to the survivors, and their lives would have changed for the better in some sort of grand Karmic righting-of-wrongs. But in reality, the survivors of the crash struggled. Some of them ultimately ended up happy, but some of them, like Archambault, experienced even more tragedy after surviving their ordeal. Shaben’s book is sensitive to their stories and their struggles, and she doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties all four of the men experienced as a direct result of the crash of Wapiti 402.

Highly recommended for fellow non-fiction lovers, people interested in aviation, and anyone looking for sensitive journalism about an avoidable tragedy.

Book review Monday: The Good Nurse, by Charles Graeber

June 3, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

I’ve talked on my blog before about how I am a carrier of the Crime Gene — no, I’m not a criminal; I just enjoy reading about them — but I haven’t discussed any of the excellent crime journalism I’ve read over the past six months, including Richard Lloyd Parry’s outstanding People Who Eat Darkness, and, more recently, Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.

Charles Graeber spent seven years researching the story of former critical care nurse Charles Cullen, who is suspected to be the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Graeber’s chilling book tells the deeply disturbing story of a nurse who was allowed by hospitals to murder his patients with impunity for sixteen years, and the difficult criminal investigation that finally led to his arrest, confession, trial, and imprisonment. How did Cullen get away with murdering patients without ever having his nursing license(s) revoked? It was shockingly easy, as it turns out. When one hospital started to suspect something was awry — a large number of recovering patients suddenly crashing with sky-high levels of insulin in their blood, for example — they would quietly send Cullen on his way, giving him neutral recommendations for his next hospital job. The hospitals didn’t want to fire Cullen outright for killing patients because that would impact on their own liability. So, one after another, the hospitals chose to cover their own butts instead of protecting patients. And in this way, Cullen bounced from hospital to hospital and continued to kill off patients in each new place of employment.

The investigative journalism show 60 Minutes recently did a segment in which they interviewed Cullen from behind bars, and it is one of the creepiest things I’ve seen in quite a while — and I watch a lot of creepy TV, you guys. First of all, Cullen looks like this:

This look is doing Cullen no favors in convincing people he’s NOT a serial killer.

Second of all, he expresses no genuine remorse about murdering what he estimates to be forty people, but what people who have studied the case believe to be a much higher number of human lives, probably in the hundreds. Instead, he sees himself as the victim. Throughout his life, he attempted suicide at least twenty times in a bid for attention, and he enjoyed being the one who had to be taken care of and pitied and nursed back to health. But in his professional capacity as a critical care nurse, he was able to exercise ultimate control and power over truly helpless people. He knew he held their lives in his hands, and rather than caring for them, he murdered them. What makes his crimes especially monstrous is that he was killing people whose families had implicitly trusted him. His actions shook many people’s faith in medical and nursing care. If you can’t trust a healthcare professional to care for your sick loved one, who can you trust?

One of the most interesting parts of this story, to me, was the involvement of a woman named Amy Ridgway, a colleague of Cullen’s who worked alongside him on the night shift at a New Jersey hospital. Ridgway was Cullen’s best friend at work, and she was initially indignant when detectives suggested that he was murdering patients — she just couldn’t believe he was capable of such a thing. After reviewing the evidence of Cullen’s drug requests during his shifts, though, she ended up cooperating with detectives to record her conversations with Cullen, which ultimately resulted in his confession. It took a lot of guts for Ridgway to wear a wire and confront Cullen, especially since she has a heart condition for which she wears a pacemaker, and the stress of acting as an undercover agent was literally putting her life at risk. Her involvement was crucial in bringing Cullen to justice. (She was also interviewed by the 60 Minutes crew.)

Graeber’s book is a quick, gripping read, and will leave you shaken (which is exactly what we want in crime journalism, of course). I’d heartily recommend it for any fellow crime gene carriers, particularly those interested in medical/nursing related crimes. Cullen’s story is shocking on several levels — not just the awful crimes themselves, but the fact that he was allowed by hospital administrations to remain at large for so many years. Horrifying.

Book review Monday: The Shining, by Stephen King

May 27, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

Programming note: Book Review Tuesday is becoming Book Review Monday, because Momma’s got a brand new bag/writing gig covering The Bachelorette for Previously.TV, and I’ll need to devote my Tuesdays to watching idiots misuse personal pronouns. Links to my pieces for Previously.TV will also be posted on Twitter and on Tube Topix.

Remember my post about Stephen King? And how I’m resolved to read more of his stuff? Well, I made good on that statement last week when I read King’s classic haunted hotel story The Shining. The verdict? It’s the best Stephen King novel I’ve read yet. And today, I want to talk both about this book and what makes it so compelling, as well as the classic-in-its-own-right movie adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, and how I’m not sure one can enjoy both the book and the movie.

As if the book weren’t creepy enough, they had to go and make this the cover.

Let’s start with the book. The Shining, for those of you who have not participated in popular culture for the last thirty-five years or so, is the story of a troubled schoolteacher-slash-writer, Jack Torrance, who loses his job at a prep school in Vermont after beating the ever-living crap out of one of his students in a fit of rage. One of his former drinking buddies and colleagues manages to set Jack up with a gig as the winter caretaker of the uber-creepy Overlook Hotel, which is set into a remote part of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Jack, who has recently quit drinking, decides to take the job, seeing it as a fresh start for him and his wife, Wendy, and their five year-old son, Danny. Danny, by the by, has a special gift where he is able to see glimpses of the future (often presented by his imaginary friend, Tony) and can read people’s thoughts. Before the Torrances pack up and move into the Overlook, Danny has several disturbing visions of what awaits them there. I don’t want to spoil the entire plot (especially since the plot of the book, including the ending, varies markedly from the movie version), but suffice it to say that the Overlook Hotel has its own ideas about the Torrances’ fresh start, and things do not go as planned once the family arrives. One word: REDRUM.

The book is a wonderful read because it manages to combine a slow build-up with consistent, page-turning creepiness. One of the main themes of the book is Jack’s struggle with alcoholism. At its heart, it’s the story of how one man’s personal demons slowly destroy him and his family. The book shows us Jack’s slow undoing, as he slips from being a loving husband and father struggling with an addiction to a shell of a man entirely inhabited by monsters. The horrors contained in the Overlook — including a bloated, rotting dead lady in a tub, a man in a dog suit, murdered children, gangsters with their brains blown out, topiary hedge animals that come to murderous life, killer wasps, and a fire extinguisher hose that morphs into a snake — are terrifying, but the most terrifying inhabitant of the hotel becomes Jack himself. We readers stand by, helpless, as The Overlook preys on Jack, knowing he’s weak and it can control him to suit its sinister purposes.

IT IS SO GOOD, this book.

After I read the book, I decided to re-watch the movie, which I hadn’t seen in twelve years (the last time I watched it was as a college freshman in someone’s dorm room), to see how it held up next to the book. And, I must say, my hearty appreciation for the book actually dampened my full enjoyment of the movie this time around. Kubrick’s movie adaptation, as creepy and well-done as it is, is not a faithful adaptation of the book. Lots of plot and character points are different. To name a few:

Danny in the book is not supposed to be creepy; he’s supposed to be tortured by his visions and the voices he hears in his head. In the movie, he’s this exceedingly creepy little kid who talks in a funny voice and references “the little boy who lives in my mouth.” Tony, Danny’s “imaginary friend” in the book, does not live in his mouth (wtf?) and also tries to protect Danny from the dangers that await him at the Overlook. We also find out something else important about Tony toward the end of the novel, but I won’t spoil it.
Mr. Ullman, the man who gives Jack the job, is supposed to be an officious, prissy jerk, not the glad-handing, newscaster-esque sort who they cast in the movie. Jack’s anger and resentment of Ullman comes up again and again in the book but is not referenced in the movie.
There’s a whole backstory in the book about the ownership of the Overlook and the corrupt goings-on that have plagued it since its opening in the early twentieth century. None of this is explicitly referenced in the movie.
The reasons Jack got fired from his schoolteacher job (namely, beating up his student) are not referenced in the movie — nor is a haunting drunk joy ride he took with his drinking buddy in which they may or may not have killed someone.
The murdered little Grady girls (“come play with us”) are referenced maybe once in the book, and they’re not twins.
There’s no labyrinth in the book; there are, however, the aforementioned murderous hedge animals.
Jack does not attempt to murder his family with an axe in the book; instead, he uses a roque mallet (roque being an earlier ancestor of croquet).
The dead lady in the tub is in room 217, not 237. Why change that, Stanley Kubrick? I ask you.
[SPOILER]: Why does the black guy have to die in the movie? C’mon.
There’s a lot of backstory in the book about Wendy’s horrible mother and Jack’s horrible father, which informs both of their choices and their dynamic as a couple.

Come play with us.

The biggest difference between the novel and the film, though, has to do with the book’s focus on Jack’s alcoholism and the idea that Jack, as an addict, is an easy tool for the Overlook. In the book, Jack is controlled by external forces; he is a pawn of a larger, evil force. In the movie, however, it seems as if Jack (as memorably played by Jack Nicholson) is bad from the start, and the Overlook merely brings out the badness that’s already lurking within him. Also, in the film, the character’s alcoholism is barely touched upon and does not appear to impact Jack’s behavior in any meaningful way. Apparently, this departure from the book was Stephen King’s biggest problem with the movie adaptation. In King’s novel, it is the hotel that is evil, not Jack Torrance. King once said, regarding his issues with Kubrick’s adaptation:

Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shiningis that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.

In other words, Kubrick missed the point entirely. And as I watched the film, I really wondered why Kubrick had made some of the changes he made. Some of the less consequential tweaks were understandable. For instance, I can see why Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend, was challenging to express in film. In the book, Tony appears in visions. I can see why having Tony “live in Danny’s mouth” and talk through Danny is a more elegant expression of Tony. But why the creepy voice and the finger? Ugh. I found myself wishing throughout the film that Kubrick had more closely followed the arc of the story in the novel; that is, a weak man is worn down by an external evil until he destroys himself and his family. It’s easy to root against a non-nuanced monster like Nicholson’s Jack Torrance. It’s more complicated — and more compelling — when the character retains human layers and some shreds of decency. For that reason, the film comes off as flatter — and less emotionally gripping — than the book.

I guess I’m going to have to add The Shining to the long list of films that pale in comparison to the books that spawned them. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I recommend that you watch the movie first, and then read the book, and prepare to be impressed and surprised by the differences.

PS. A new interview with Stephen King in Parade.

Book review Tuesday: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

May 21, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

When my cousin Amanda was visiting, she recommended Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone to me one night over dinner in Cape Town. A few days later, I saw the book in the airport in Durban and felt that it was meant to be, so I bought it. I can now say, after reading it, that this book is unlike any novel I’ve ever read before, for several reasons: it involves conjoined — and then unjoined — twins, it includes grisly descriptions of surgeries on almost every page, it discusses the history of Christianity in both India and Ethiopia, and its author is a professor of medicine at Stanford, my alma mater. Impressive!

This novel is huge, mostly because of its sweeping scope. The story starts on the day in 1954 that the narrator, Marion, and his twin brother, Shiva, were born in Addis Ababa, and then spans over thirty years and across continents. Without giving anything away, a rift develops between the twins, who were once preternaturally close — almost able to read one another’s thoughts — but who eventually stop speaking because of a perceived betrayal of one by the other. Eventually, a serious crisis brings them together again. (No spoilers…)

The story of the two brothers is emotionally compelling and interesting, and full of mysteries that are sussed out as the novel progresses. Their birth was the product of a scandalous tryst between an Indian nun and nurse, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, and an English surgeon, Thomas Stone, who worked together in a small hospital in Addis; they were then raised by two Indian surgeons who adopted them at birth when their biological mother died in childbirth and their biological father peaced out; they grow up in a tumultuous time in Ethiopian political history; and they both become surgeons themselves, albeit with very different paths. However, the story of Shiva and Marion becomes a bit bogged down by the aforementioned long and torturously detailed descriptions of the many surgeries performed by the characters, some of which are truly stomach-turning. I had to do a lot of skimming so as not to feel nauseated by certain parts of this book. For those of you with a medical or nursing bent, you might have a different experience with this, but for me, I could have done without the intimate details of how, for instance, a fistula repair works. Just sayin’.

For me, the most interesting portions of the book were those that discussed Ethiopian history and culture, including the ancient brand of Christianity practiced there. I really liked a passage in which one of the hospital’s donors, a Mr. Elihu Harris from Houston, visits Matron, the head nun and nurse at the hospital in Addis. His church has donated Bibles to the hospital in the hopes of bringing “knowledge of the Redeemer to those who do not have it.”

Matron let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you think they were all fire worshippers? Tree worshippers? Mr. Harris, they are Christians. They are no more in need of redemption than you are in ned of a hair straightening cream.”

“But I feel it’s not true Christianity. It’s a pagan sort of…,” he said, and patted his forehead.

“Pagan! Mr. Harris, when our pagan ancestors back in Yorkshire and Saxony were using their enemies’ skulls as a plate to serve food, these Christians here were singing the psalms. They believe they have the Ark of the Covenant locked up in a church in Axum. Not a saint’s finger or a pope’s toe, but the Ark! Ethiopian believers put on the shirts of men who had just died of the plague. They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life, of finding salvation. That,” she said, tapping the table, “is how much they thirsted for the next life.”

Verghese also talks about the ancient Christian church in India, in the state of Kerala. He explains that “Malayali Christians traced their faith back to St. Thomas’s arrival in India from Damascus in A.D. 52. ‘Doubting’ Thomas built his first churches in Kerala well before St. Peter got to Rome.” I had no idea Christianity in India predated the Roman Catholic Church — fascinating.

I’d recommend this book for those looking for a slightly more exotic brand of historical fiction, those who are interested in surgery — particularly as practiced in the developing world in the 1950s-1970s — and medicine, and/or those who like a good betrayal-redemption story. The book is long, and graphic, but it’s emotionally satisfying enough to keep you reading, despite the gross surgery scenes.

[In case you’re interested in other perspectives on this book, here is a lukewarm review from the New York Times and a more positive one from The Guardian).

Book review Tuesday: Top of the Morning, by Brian Stelter

May 14, 2013 / Stephanie / 2 Comments

I’ll admit it: I watch morning TV. A lot of people — especially educated people who fancy themselves to be above it all — won’t admit to ever tuning into such drivel as the Today show or Good Morning America. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard some variation of “Oh, I think it’s so sad that some people get their news from morning shows,” as if getting your news from Twitter is so much more high-minded. (Don’t pretend, morning TV haters: you’re not tuning into Al Jazeera. You’re getting half of your information from Gawker and then skimming the headlines on Google News. I’m onto you). Anyway, I don’t see any point in denying it: I watch morning TV because I find that the 7 to 8 AM hour of the Today show is just as an effective way to get my basic news as anything else. Plus, once the 8 AM hour starts, maybe I’ll get a few cooking tips or find out what color jeggings I should be buying this season. So it’s all gravy.

I’d say that one of the most interesting aspects of morning TV is the whiff of the private dramas that are undoubtedly simmering just below the surface among the cast-mates. We morning TV viewers watch with almost pervy interest to see if Matt Lauer’s going to snap at Natalie Morales (lovers’ quarrel?), or if Lara Spencer’s going to make another awkward comment about Sam Champion’s taste in interior decor. At least, that’s what I do when I watch. And that’s what I was doing in June 2012, in the weeks and days before Ann Curry was unceremoniously dumped from the Today show and replaced by Savannah Guthrie. I had been following the news of Ann’s imminent sacking for weeks before it happened, and I watched Today every day with rapt interest, trying to see if I could pick up on the tension between Matt Lauer, morning show demi-god, and Curry, who, let’s be honest, kinda sucks at being on TV. For those of you not familiar with Ann Curry’s on-air presence, this (harsh) Gawker article from March 2012 sort of sums it up. And Ann’s last day on the Today show couch? Oy. Being forced to watch it should probably be integrated into the “enhanced interrogation” techniques at Guantanamo.

So, given my prurient interest in morning show drama, I was eager to read Brian Stelter’s Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, in which Stelter dissects the decisions at NBC leading to Curry’s firing; discusses Good Morning America (GMA)’s rise in 2012-2013, which ultimately resulted in an end to the Today Show’s years-long ratings streak; and looks into the recent up-cropping of other morning shows, including the MSNBC cult favorite Morning Joe. [Fun fact: I also was interested in the book because I met Brian Stelter before — years ago — in a bar. He’s a friend of my dear friend, Claire].

Much of Stelter’s book focuses on the fierce (and decades-long) rivalry between Today and GMA. This rivalry, by the way, in which the Today show sees itself as the “serious” show and GMA sees itself as the “fun” show, is actually kind of ridiculous, at least from an outsider’s perspective, given that these two shows both contain some news content and a hefty amount of fluff. Nonetheless, Stelter writes, “Loyalists to Today liked to describe GMA as smutty, crappy, and, most of all, tabloid.” In contrast, the Today show has traditionally seen itself as erudite and sophisticated — yet, this is the same show that employs the doddering Willard Scott, whose Smuckers-sponsored birthday greetings make me cringe with second-hand embarrassment. But really, both of these shows have a little bit of tabloid and a little bit of news thrown in to the mix. Stelter observes, “No one disputes that the morning shows are supposed to be entertaining as well as informative — look no further than the chimp on the Today show set in the 1950s for proof of that. The philosophical battle is over the mix — the exact proportions of light versus dark, of You Should Know This versus You’ll Enjoy This.” Finding this balance appears to be a constant struggle for both GMA and Today, but especially for Today, which seems to wrestle with delusions of, if not grandeur, sophistication.

Top of the Morning is a snappy, dishy read, full of inside information from people at the networks and plenty of gossip about the relationships between the stars at the center of the Today and GMA lineups. I found Stelter’s discussion of the vast differences in chemistry between the casts of Today and GMA to be particularly interesting. His observation that a network can effectively manufacture success by handpicking a cast with chemistry, energy, and enthusiasm — which is what GMA has accomplished over the last year or so — is fascinating. (Less interesting to me was the in-depth discussion of the ratings war between GMA and Today. My eyes tended to skim over the numbers, in search of more juicy gossip. But then, I’m not really a numbers lady).

I also really enjoyed Stelter’s brutal (but accurate) diagnosis of the problems that plagued Ann Curry as a Today show anchor. For example, Stelter observes, Curry had a tendency to come off as both disingenuous and awkward, and her “on-air comebacks to Lauer during her first months as cohost were just plain weird — the conversational Hacky Sack often fell thudding to the rug, or, figuratively speaking, wound up in the saucepan put out for Al Roker’s cooking segment.” Nailed it. For me, as a Today show viewer, this complete inability to make basic small-talk was one of the most grating things about Curry. I used to cringe — literally, cringe — sometimes watching her flub an interview or make weird comments to her co-hosts.

Poor Ann Curry.

Despite Curry’s tremendous awkwardness, though, after reading Top of the Morning, I do feel sorry for her. She was roundly mistreated by NBC. Even if one is bad at one’s job, one deserves a humane and dignified dismissal, rather than the dragged-out public humiliation Curry was subjected to. Karmically speaking, it didn’t work out well for Today, either, so I guess what goes around comes around.

Top of the Morning is definitely a book geared toward morning TV viewers. If you don’t watch these shows, it probably won’t be interesting to you, unless you’re interested in the television industry in general. So, those of you who only get your news via carrier pigeon might want to skip it. But for those of us who enjoy a little trash with our morning coffee, there’s a lot of good stuff in this book — recommended.

Book review Tuesday: Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell

May 7, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

Eleanor & Park is, in a word, delightful. Other adjectives that I’d use to describe it include charming, sweet, heartfelt, moving, emotionally satisfying, and adorable. I read it in less than a day and was enraptured the entire time, and I want everyone to go out and read this book, right now. Go!

I was predisposed to like this novel because I read and loved Rowell’s first novel, Attachments, another sweet, moving, funny love story. And actually, I think Eleanor & Park is even better than Attachments; it packs a big emotional wallop with a great payoff. After reading Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, which left me feeling down in the dumps and emotionally manipulated, Eleanor & Park is a breath of fresh air. It’s not all saccharine-sweet happiness — there are some serious emotional ups and downs — but the ending feels true and real and right, and I loved it.

The story is about two teenagers — the aforementioned Eleanor and Park — who live in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1980s. The narrative switches between Eleanor and Park throughout the book. These two kids each have struggles fitting in: Park, who’s half-Korean, is one of the only Asians in his entire school — perhaps the entire state — and Eleanor, the new girl in town, is chubby and awkward, with crazy red hair, and comes from a rough family situation, with an abusive stepfather, absent father, and weak mother. Eleanor and Park make an unlikely pair, but, surprising everyone (including themselves), they fall in love. They ride the bus to school together, and after a rocky start, become friends, and then something more. They bond over comic books, music, jokes, and their shared sense of isolation — real or imagined — at their high school and within their own families. The description of the torturous process by which Eleanor and Park fall in love is so sweet, so tender, so pure, that it almost made me cry several times. But the real tears started when Eleanor and Park face a seemingly insurmountable challenge to their relationship, and have to figure out a solution. The last ten percent of this book (I read it on my Kindle) nearly had me in tears the entire time, which was not ideal, since I was reading it while sitting on a stationary bike at the gym. Fighting off tears did provide a cardio challenge, though!

I want to share just a few of the many snippets in the book that I had to highlight as I was reading. These passages spoke to me even though I was never in love as a teenager: the story of Eleanor and Park transcends the fact that they are teens, in the 1980s, in Omaha. There’s some universal stuff in here. I mean, Rowell’s descriptions of what it feels like to be in love are just dead-on. Some of my favorite little bits follow:

“Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.”

“He put his pen in his pocket, then took her hand and held it to his chest for a minute. It was the nicest thing she could imagine. It made her want to have his babies and give him both of her kidneys.”

“They walked down every street of the market area, and then across the street, into a park. Eleanor didn’t even know all this existed. She hadn’t realized Omaha could be such a nice place to live. (In her head, this was Park’s doing, too. The world rebuilt itself into a better place around him.)”

“You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you’ll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away. Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.”

Oh, God. I’m tearing up just transcribing these quotes! Apart from completely nailing the feeling of being in love, especially new love, Rowell does a great job describing some of the conflicts that arise in this particular high school relationship, particularly around the universal teenage desire to be well-liked (or, at least, not picked on) and the urge to be loyal to one’s boyfriend or girlfriend. Park doesn’t get picked on because, for one thing, he grew up in the area and is good looking (even though he’s not necessarily “cool”) but Eleanor, on the other hand, is a walking target for bullies. Thus, Park has to wrestle with his loyalty to Eleanor and his own desire to fly under the radar and avoid being bullied himself. (Hint: he makes the right choice in the end).

“God, she had adorable cheeks. Dimples on top of freckles, which shouldn’t even be allowed, and round as crabapples. It was kind of amazing that more people didn’t try to pinch her cheeks. His grandma was definitely going to pinch her when they met. But Park hadn’t thought that either, the first time he saw Eleanor on the bus. He remembered thinking that it was bad enough that she looked the way she did… Did she have to dress like that? And act like that? Did she have to try so hard to be different? He remembered feeling embarrassed for her. And now… Now, he felt the fight rising up in his throat whenever he thought of people making fun of her.”

The relationship that develops between Eleanor and Park is nuanced and delicate, but also deep and strong. It’s a joy to behold. So if you want an emotionally rewarding, well-written, and utterly sweet novel to take your mind off your troubles, please please please go pick up Eleanor & Park.

(And here’s another glowing review by the New York Times, in case you’re still not convinced).

Book review Tuesday: The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer

April 30, 2013 / Stephanie / 9 Comments

I finished Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings last night and was so bummed out by both the ending and my own reaction to the book that I immediately had to start something more upbeat (in this case, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, which is excellent so far) in order to take my mind off of The Interestings before going to sleep. And now I need to figure out whether I liked or disliked this book, because it could go either way.

This was one of those books, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, about which I had heard a tremendous amount of buzz before I read it. However, unlike AVFTGS, I didn’t put off reading this one until everyone and their mother had read it. Instead, I snapped it right up onto my Kindle shortly after it came out. However, all of the aforementioned buzz was both a blessing and a curse in terms of my enjoyment of this book. At first, I had read and heard only positive reviews. This novel had been compared to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot and, well, they had me at Eugenides. Barrie Hardymon, a guest contributor on one of my favoritest podcasts, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, raved about the book, and I tend to like her suggestions, so all systems were go. And, indeed, as soon as I started reading this book, I loved it. And then, along the way, things started to change.

First, a very brief plot summary of the book: the story starts off at a summer camp for the arts in the Berkshires in 1974. A group of smart, privileged teenagers who enjoy, variously, music, pretentious literature, animation, drama, and weed, come together as friends and deem themselves “The Interestings.” (This opening, while obnoxious, nonetheless rings true, because don’t all teenagers labor under the delusion that they and their friends are The Most Interesting People in the World?) The novel then traces the lives of these five friends — Jules, Ethan, Ash, Goodman, and Jonah — over the next forty-odd years, as some excel and others flounder.

This book has a lot of great stuff in it. I bookmarked so many passages on my Kindle that I can hardly choose which ones to share, because Wolitzer’s observations about life are all so on-the-nose. I read several reviews that describe this novel as “astute,” and that’s a perfect word to use; Wolitzer, through her prose, nails so many universal human experiences and emotions: jealousy, dissatisfaction, early love, sadness, euphoria, nostalgia. Wolitzer’s best observations, though, are around friendship and marriage. I absolutely loved a scene in which Jules, a character through whose perspective much of the novel is filtered, and her husband Dennis go out to dinner with their lifelong friends Ethan and Ash and another couple that Ethan and Ash are friends with. Ethan and Ash are now much wealthier than Jules and Dennis, and Jules is acutely aware of how different the two couples’ lives have become, especially when it comes to new friends.

The friends of Ash and Ethan in question had been a couple of recent friendship vintage. The husband was a portfolio manager, slightly older, and the wife was an interior designer who also ran a literacy program in East Harlem. Both of them were lithe and angled, their clothes made of linen, and the dinner that night hadn’t been awkward so much as depressing. The portfolio manager and his wife had nothing to ask Jules and Dennis. It wouldn’t have even occurred to them to ask them anything. The fact that all the interest flowed toward that couple did not seem at all unusual to them. They neutrally accepted the one-way flow, and Dennis in particular kept the conversation going, wanting to know the answers to various questions. Once again, he was interested in other people; it was an admirable quality generally, but in this case it irritated Jules, who didn’t want these people to think they should accept other people’s interest as their due. She herself, in her mild rage, began to ask them question after question. “What are the literacy rates in our country?” she drunkenly demanded of the wife. And, barely having listened to the answer, she turned to the husband and said, “Since when did ‘portfolio’ start to refer to money, not artwork? It’s like the way if someone’s an analyst, it no longer means they’re Freudian, it means they study the stock market.”

There are also a lot of trenchant observations about feminism, which are illuminated through the female characters’ struggles to find balance among career aspirations, motherhood, and marriage. I also enjoyed Wolitzer’s descriptions of the ways in which various characters reckon with their need to be — or at least, to feel — interesting, special, and unique, even into adulthood. Like I said, Wolitzer packs a lot of great stuff into this book, and manages to keep things interesting (pardon the phrasing) despite the large scope of the book (40+ years, competing plot-lines, etc.). So there’s a lot of Good here.

Now, though, we need to talk about The Bad. I made the mistake, midway through this book, of reading some more reviews, like this one from The New York Times, this one from the Washington Post, and this one from The Boston Globe. I can’t remember what compelled me to do this — I try to never read reviews when I am mid-book — but I think something must have been bothering me about the book and I wanted to suss out if I was the only one feeling the way I felt. Instead of echoing my own observations back to me, thereby affirming my experience of the novel, these reviews gave me other things to focus on. For example, the WaPost review, which was pretty harsh, noted:

So “The Interestings” gets bogged down with long-winded explications and gratuitous, self-serious and often awkwardly phrased historical references: “It would be ten years before the notorious case in which another prep-school boy attacked a girl in Central Park. . . . And it would be thirteen years before a young female investment banker out for a jog in the park at night was raped and beaten into a coma.” The writing here has all the weary cheerlessness of a participant approaching the end of an all-day charity walkathon.

Ouch. After reading that, I started to notice that, yes, Wolitzer does try to infuse the characters’ lives with historical meaning, or at least to situate every one of their life events into some larger cultural trend, which gets irritating, and feels unnecessary and forced.

But these reviews didn’t point out what bothered me most about the book, and that is the focus on the character of Jules, who Wolitzer paints as the sort-of, almost, kinda heroine of this story. I found Jules hard to take and didn’t understand, despite what I suspect was meant to be a sympathetic portrayal of her, why she had friends at all. Jules to me was grating, insecure, boring, needy, and remarkably unspecial. Even when Jules made observations that rang true to me, I attributed those observations to Meg Wolitzer rather than to Jules Jacobson, which was probably not the intent of the author. I felt that Wolitzer’s sympathies with Jules were misplaced; to me, there were far more sympathetic characters available in Ethan or even Jonah. What’s most baffling to me was the fact that Ethan Figman, the only member of the troupe of Interestings who actually met with wild success as an adult (and, arguably, was the only one ambitious or talented enough to pursue such success), carried an undying flame for Jules throughout the book. What started off as a fairly inexplicable teenage crush at camp evolved into a deeply inexplicable non-requited love into adulthood; Ethan thought Jules was just the bees knees, and I just don’t understand why. It’s like Jules is a Mary Sue but without any of the good qualities.

Finally, the book’s lumbering, depressing end, with more tragedy than was perhaps strictly necessary, left me feeling deflated. I don’t demand a happy ending from every book I read, but the ending of this book felt particularly hopeless. I like a teeny bit of redemptive hope tucked into any depressing ending, and I didn’t find that here.

Did I hate this book? No. Did I love it? Well, yes, parts of it. But overall, The Interestings was a mixed bag for me. Final verdict: I would recommend it because mostly, it was a good read. It was packed with sharp observations and the characters’ stories did carry emotional weight. But the book was unsatisfying to me in two key ways: its putative heroine, who was disappointing, and the ending, which was depressing. Still, this book made an impression on me, and the fact that I’ve written so much here trying to sort out my reactions to it is probably a sign that it’s worth picking up.

Book review Tuesday: An ode to Stephen King

April 16, 2013 / Stephanie / 7 Comments

Quick note before I jump into the normal Tuesday book talk: I am so upset, like everyone else, by the Boston Marathon bombings. I lived in the Boston area for three years and love that city, even though its people can be a wee bit prickly – hey, that’s part of its charm. I feel blessed that none of my friends who still live in the Boston area were hurt in the bombings, but I know that a lot of other people weren’t so lucky. My heart hurts for everyone affected by the bombings, and for our country. I take some comfort in stories like this, about the kindness that springs out of tragedy. Hang in there, Boston.

Today’s book review is a salute to one of our greatest and yet most maligned authors, Stephen King. I never considered myself a real King fan until the past year or so, but now I take every opportunity to defend the guy when he is smeared by schmancy literary types. I think Stephen King’s a genius, and I don’t care who knows it.

I became a Stephen King fan after being exposed to his work by Al’s dad and step-mom, David and Ginger. They live in Bangor, Maine, the same little city where King lives in his grand — and perhaps slightly spooky looking — red house with white trim and spidery front gate.

Stephen King’s house in Bangor

Whenever Al and I are in Maine visiting family, I insist that we take a run or a walk past King’s house, first, because it’s awesome, and second, because I live in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the man himself.

David and Ginger also happen to be big Stephen King fans and have read most of his books (and there are a lot of them). I hadn’t read any of his books when I first started coming to Bangor, but I had seen a bunch of the movie adaptations: Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, Dolores Claiborne. I remember for my birthday one year (I think it was my thirteenth) I had a sleepover with a bunch of girls during which we ate pizza, drank pop, and watched Carrie. My birthday is four days before Halloween and thus, I had some sort of “spooky” party nearly every year, so it seemed appropriate. Carrie, by the way, is an excellent — and SUPER scary — movie. That last scene? Holy mackerel. Gets me every time. *Shudders.* (By the way, they’re remaking Carrie and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look half bad).

Anyway, it wasn’t until Ginger gave me King’s 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that I began to really appreciate Stephen King. I read the book in early 2012, just as I was starting to eke out the rough ideas that would eventually become my first manuscript, and it was incredibly inspiring. On Writing is part memoir, part practical writing guide, and it includes a post-script discussing Stephen King’s horrific accident in 1999, when he was hit by a van while walking along a rural road in western Maine. Shortly after reading the book, in February 2012, I wrote this short review on Goodreads:

As someone who is about to embark on the slightly terrifying (but very exciting) journey to become a professional writer, I find King’s story immensely inspiring. His message is that to succeed in writing on a professional level, one must be persistent, dogged, and, to some extent, rigid. He insists on writing a minimum amount each day, for example, which is probably difficult on some days but has obviously worked to his advantage, considering how prolific he has been and continues to be. The book was also engaging because of King’s personal history: he writes about his struggles with alcoholism and his recovery from a near fatal car accident, but he also writes movingly about his relationship with his wife (who convinced him to get his draft of Carrie out of the trash can and give it another go) and reflects personally on some of his books. His writing advice tends toward the basic, in terms of grammar, structure, syntax, but the process-based advice is valuable. I especially like his perspective that stories exist in the universe and are waiting to be unearthed, and it is through the process of writing that we uncover them. Highly recommended for would-be writers and fans of King’s books.

Re-reading what I wrote then, it’s striking to me how much of King’s advice I have followed over the past year, and how helpful I’ve found it. For example, King writes a minimum of ten pages (or 2,000 words) a day when he is working on a novel. If it takes him an hour to do that, fine; if it takes him all day, fine. He explains:

On some days, those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.

Since I started writing my first manuscript, I’ve followed King’s formula: 2,000 words per weekday, minimum. It’s worked like a charm. I started a second manuscript last week and so far I have almost 29,000 words written. Thank you, Mr. King, for the excellent advice.

King also stresses that to be a good writer, one must read a lot and write a lot. Check and check. I love that my compulsive, drinking-from-the-fire-hose-style reading — a former guilty pleasure — is now part of my job. And I love the way King discusses how reading helps us become better writers:

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose — one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in.

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy — “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand” — but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing — of being flattened, in fact — is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Oh, I could go on and on about all of the utterly practical yet deeply inspiring advice in On Writing that has helped me so much over the past year, but I’ll let you read it for yourself. It’s a wonderful book.

After reading On Writing, I decided to delve into some of King’s fiction, and so over the last year I’ve read Bag of Bones (spooky but a bit long), The Dead Zone (a classic, also a bit long), and Salem’s Lot (creepy and, well, a bit long). Now I have The Shining sitting in my Kindle queue and I’m looking forward to reading it. Now, say what you will about King’s flaws — he’s long-winded, his dialogues can be cringe-worthy, why do all of his books have to involve a writer living in Maine?, his prose can be a tad clunky at times — but I dare anyone to argue that the man’s not a storytelling genius. Think of all the classic stories that came out of his brain, stories that are now so entrenched in popular culture that they’ve become truly iconic: Carrie, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Misery, The Shining, The Green Mile, Christine, Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, Thinner. I mean, you know you’ve made it when Family Guy does an episode parodying a movie based on one of your books, or Eminem works a reference into one of his songs (“I cannot grow old in ‘Salem’s Lot!”). Seriously – one dude, Stephen King, has come up with all of these stories. The mind boggles at the creativity.

As a writer, I feel indebted to King for his practical wisdom and for the admirable example he’s set: he’s prolific, he’s dedicated, he’s humble, and dang, he’s a unique thinker. I encourage you all to check out King’s work — starting with On Writing, if you’re at all inclined toward putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) — and see what you think. I’ll leave you with some of King’s closing wisdom from that book:

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy… Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.