morsie reads

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Women on Wednesday: Orange Prize

The Orange Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually (usually in June) for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the England and/or Ireland in the preceding year. The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a 7.5 inch bronze sculpture called the "Bessie" created by artist Grizel Niven.

A relatively young prize, Orange Prize for Fiction honored its first winner in 1996. The founders of the Orange Prize for Fiction (including Kate Mosse) were concerned that many of the most significant literary prizes often appeared to overlook writing by women. To that end, only female authors are eligible for the prize and the competition is judged exclusively by women. The longlist for the prize is usually announced in March and the shortlist in April.

The first Orange of Oranges Prize (a take on the Booker of Bookers Prize) was awarded Andrea Levy for her novel Small Island in 2005 in celebration of the Orange Prize for Fiction's tenth anniversary. Also christened in 2005 was the Orange Award for New Writers with a £10,000 award.

- Posted as part of Women on Wednesday

Labels: wow

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Leviathan

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

I've been looking forward to reading Leviathan since I happened across a copy while browsing at Barnes and Noble. The publisher's synopsis is in this post and if you go to this page and scroll down you can see a really excellent trailer.

Leviathan is set at the dawn of the Great War, but in an Europe much different from our own historic Europe. In the world of Leviathan, Europe is divided between Clankers (powers that employ high-tech steam-driven machinery, ie. Central Powers) and Darwinists (who rely on fabricated animals created through advanced biotechnology pioneered by Charles Darwin himself, ie. Allies). The novel's main characters are Aleksandar, the only son of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Deryn, a teenage girl trying to pass as a boy and join the British air force.

I enjoyed Leviathan so much that I read it with conflicting desires: I wanted to get through it quickly to find out what happens, but I also wanted to savor it. I'm very much looking forward to the sequels (apparently Leviathan is the first in a four-book series).

I liked the characters. I thought the story was compelling (and that there was enough meat to it to nourish a series). I was fascinated by the world Westerfeld was able to create. And, I thought Keith Thompson's illustrations were wonderful.

Highly recommended. Russell is reading our copy now and then I'm loaning it to a friend.

Labels: YA fiction

Monday, November 23, 2009

It's Monday! What are you reading?

This past week I finished reading:

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith (see post)
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (post to come)
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (see post)

As always I have loads of titles waiting in the wings, but here are the titles I'm actively reading:

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith (the sequel to 44 Scotland Street; a New York Public Library on-demand audio book)
Last Orders at Harrods by Michael Holman

Labels: currently-reading

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Wintergirls

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

I mentioned Wintergirls in this post when it first came out. It's been six months now and I've finally gotten around to reading the novel. I have to admit that while I wanted to read Wintergirls, I was a bit leery because of the subject matter. I knew Anderson would have handled the subject well since I'd read Speak, but I knew Wintergirls would be a difficult read and I wasn't sure that I was up for it. After reading it I can report that Wintergirls is not an easy read, but it definitely was not as difficult as I expected it to be.

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Lia finding out that her best friend Cassie had died the night before ("...body found in a motel room, alone..."). At this point 18-year-old Lia, suffering from anorexia nervosa, has already been hospitalized twice. She is living with her father, stepmother, and younger stepsister and doing everything she can to keep losing weight without letting any of the authority figures in her life catch on.

Wintergirls is written as Lia's interior monologue. As such it is very effective. Things don't always make sense, but that's because Lia's perception of the world (and herself) is skewed. I really liked the way that Anderson represented Lia's self-editing and recurring thoughts.

The novel is haunting and Lia is not necessarily a sympathetic character, but Wintergirls is a well-written and important book. It's a book that you might not want to read, but that you can't help but keep reading once you've started. My biggest frustration when reading the novel was with Lia's father and step-mother. It seemed so obvious that Lia was not doing well, that she was falling into her old patterns, that she was lying and sneaking around, but they were almost willfully oblivious.

Labels: YA fiction

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

Subtitled "a memoir of going home," Mennonite in a Little Black Dress begins with what is arguably the worst week of author Rhoda Janzen's life. A debilitating automobile crash on the heels of her husband leaving her for a man he met through Gay.com* is more than she can handle. Janzen decides to recenter herself by spending some time with her family and the Mennonite community from which they are inseparable.

While the narrative is very open and chatty, I found Janzen to be far too self- and Mennonite-deprecating for my taste. The author doesn't portray herself as a sympathetic character. Additionally it seems that that because the Mennonite culture is perceived to be a selling-point, the author felt the need to make that the focus of the memoir. I think the book would have been stronger if I had just been about this difficult patch she went through and her going home (even with all the reminiscences about her childhood). Throughout the narrative, though, Janzen feels the need to make all kinds of witty (or snarky) observations about the Mennonite community in which she grew up. This detracts from the overall story.

I was also disappointed in the ending. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress ends with a strange appendix entitled "A Mennonite History Primer" in which Janzen goes over things that non-Mennonites need to know about Mennonites (many of which had been mentioned multiple times in the course of the memoir). I think the book would have had a better sense of closure without the appendix. The beginning of the appendix looks exactly like the beginning of any of the other chapters so readers are liable to read it as if it is the last chapter (like I did, I didn't realize it was labeled as an appendix until I sat down to write up this book) and as a last chapter it is a bit inexplicable.

This all isn't to say that I didn't enjoy parts of the book and that I didn't laugh out loud at some points, just that I was disappointed. This book seemed to have so much potential so my expectations were high. In particular, knowing that the author is an English professor, I expected the writing to be better.

* Janzen uses the phrase "Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com" many times (too many times!) during the course of the book.

Labels: memoir

Friday, November 20, 2009

44 Scotland Street

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

44 Scotland Street, the book and the house, is peopled with a variety of interesting personages: Bruce, a narcissistic junior surveyor; Pat, a 21-year-old girl struggling to find her place in the world before going off to college; Dominica,* an eccentric widow; and Bertie, a brilliant little boy who is plagued by an overzealous, overbearing mother, Irene. Originally published serially in The Scotsman, 44 Scotland Street is the story of those five characters and the people they encounter in their everyday lives.

I enjoyed 44 Scotland Street so much that I've already checked out the second book in the series, Espresso Tales. The story threads were interesting and all the characters full-bodied. Some of them were wonderfully sympathetic and others were irritating, but in that people-you-love-to-hate way. I also loved the guest stars who pop up from time to time.

The nature of serial novels makes them perfect candidates for audio books, I think, because they make it easy to pick up where you left off and to reorient yourself in the book's world even when you haven't had a chance to listen to the book for quite some time.

* I may not have the names spelled correctly as I listened to the audio version

Labels: general fiction

Thursday, November 19, 2009

book clubbing in November

I'd been looking forward to our book club meeting this month because I expected that we'd have a good discussion. It seemed like people were falling at all points in the spectrum in their response to this month's selection, Loving Frank: some loving it, some hating it, and some feeling neither here nor there.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

This biographical novel is the story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's longtime mistress. Mamah first met Wright when her husband convinced her to have the architect design a new house for their family. She works closely with Wright during the design and construction of the house, her affair with Wright, however, doesn't begin until three years later. Mamah's feelings for Wright and her dissatisfaction with her staid, married life, compel her to leave her husband and children.

Loving Frank follows Mamah throughout her relationship with Wright, from its genesis, through her years with Wright in Europe and her homemaking at Taliesin in Wisconsin. The novel's ending comes as a complete shock to those unfamiliar with Wright's lifestory (like me).

Loving Frank was indeed a good book club book. It gave us lots to talk about. We discussed:

what we did and did not know about Wright before reading the novel,
how much Buffalo featured in the novel (not at all really, only references to Darwin Martin loaning Wright money),
who Ellen Key (the Swedish feminist that Mamah befriends) was, what we thought of her beliefs, and what her role was in the story;
how much architecture featured in the novel,
why Catherine Wright (Frank's first wife) doesn't grant him a divorce,
how many times Taliesin burned down and whether Wright should not have taken it as an omen,
why the author focused so much on the press coverage of the affair,
how we felt about Mamah's choices and why she might have made them,
the writing (particularly the pacing, how the author told us things rather than showing them to us, and what we perceived as a lack of romance in the lovestory),
and
the reader (of the audio version), and the abridgment (also of the audio version)

among other things.

Labels: historical fiction