Notable from the NYT

Wondering what the year of 2010 has brought to the literary table? Thanks to my fantastic brother (and the New York Times), you can stuff that wondering into a drawer: check out this list of the notable novels of 2010!

BOW: READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

Happy Sunday! Well, between the holiday and a hectic work schedule (and, if I'm being completely honest with you, a slight albeit unjustifiable discomfort with nonfiction), it took me a bonus week--oops!--but I finally wrapped up Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, the basic gist of this New York Times Bestseller is a collection of ruminations from a female professor of English Literature living in the controversial and at times tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran. When I first started the book--and I will confess, I actually started this book once before several years ago but couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so (again, thanks to my general awkwardness around nonfiction)--I presumed that it was going to be a rather linear story revolving around Ms. Nafisi's book club, which consisted of seven diverse Iranian women united by their passion and commitment to literature. While this group dominates the memoir's first section (including those 30 pages I read a few years back), the novel as a whole has a much more meandering structure, loosely organized into four sections that link to four novelists: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. Each section reminisces on Nafisi's experiences teaching one of these talented Western authors in revolutionary Iran, suggesting how--unlikely as it might seem at first glance--each of them provide incredibly salient lessons.

While I did find Nafisi's insights on each of these authors to be truly illuminating, and while I appreciated the overarching theme of novels as arbiters of empathy in their uniquely democratic form, this meandering structure I mentioned became a real hindrance...Nafisi talks about truly horrendous instances of radical Islam's war on individuality with artful precision, and portrays the power of fiction with an equally impressive ease, but in spite of all this interesting content, the book moved slowly, weaving back and forth between conversations and internal thoughts, past and present, this event and that, so that it was all rather fuzzy and jumbled and--if I'm being honest, a little repetitive, too. This serpentine and at times redundant approach slightly tarnishes Nafisi's eloquent prose, but the overall message of the novel's transformative potential is still wonderful and worth reading.

So what's on the docket next week? I am thrilled to announce I will be reading Gourmet Rhapsody, by the divine Muriel Barbery--that's right, the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, meaning she can do no wrong in my book! I'm really hoping this book will surprise and delight in the same way her previous work has. Check back next week to find out!

Have you read more than six of these books?

Happy Holidays, All!!! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend filled with family, friends, and delicious food. My man and I were lucky enough to spend Turkey day with my amazing extended family outside of Atlanta, and enjoyed a relaxing day full of love (and yummy food, of course). After an amazing feast but before the dessert extravaganza began, I noticed a facebook post from my lovely friend Courtney, referencing a BBC article that most people have read only 6 of the following 100 books. Oh dear! I truly hope that's not the case, and thought as a fun blog post I'd show you what I've read and hear from all of you, as well. I've read 61 total, plus excerpts from another 7. Here we go:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It's true. I am an avid lover of the whole Harry Potter industry. Have I read all the books multiple times? You bet. Have I dreamed about going to the new Hogwarts amusement park in Orlando? Of course. Have I had that decidedly dorky but infinitely interesting conversation about which house the sorting hat would place me in? Duh (Ravenclaw). And finally, am I so ridiculously excited for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I???

You better believe it! Weekend plans include dragging my supportive (but-not-so-enamored-with-the-whole-HP-business-fiance) to the movies. Also on the table: going to see the movie a second time with my much more interested-in-Harry-Potter-and-also-by-the-way-totally-fabulous-cousin-Anne over the Thanksgiving holiday. Can't wait!!!

BOW: The Crying of Lot 49

Happy Sunday, readers! This morning I managed to wrap up Thomas Pynchon's dense 1965 satire, The Crying of Lot 49. For those of you who are familiar with Pynchon's prose, you can imagine the challenge of wading through one of his novels in less than seven days--even if it is only 152 pages! And for those of you who aren't familiar, let me take a minute to elaborate: good ol' Thomas Pynchon is known for cultural satire, for witty puns, for oddball and elaborate shifting storylines that can at times be difficult to follow...for a whole lot of awesome+crazy, basically.

I have to admit though, I think that being on such a tight timeline might have helped me out a little with TCL49--because even if on the Pynchon scale it is relatively straightforward, in reality, it's still a bear. It's kind of like James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man--certainly less formidable than Ulysses, but still not really what I'd characterize as beach reading. Anyway, because of my compact timeline, rather than getting bogged down in researching every possible allusion or puzzling over the narrative shifts, I kind of just went with it, enjoying TCL49's lyricism, humor, and rollicking pace. Now, I certainly want to read the novel again more leisurely (perhaps with an encyclopedia in one hand and J. Kerry Grant's companion in the other, which btdubs, is actually longer than the novel it explains, if that gives you any idea of what we're dealing with here), but what I may have missed out on this time in terms of punny references, I think I gained in maintaining a sense of narrative continuity.

In particular, I really got intrigued by the novel's exploration of communication's failures--both in the present and between generations. Of primary significance in the story is the symbol of a horn--at times muted (when representing a hypothetical counter-culture mail system, W.A.S.T.E.), and other times unmuted (when it symbolizes a historical courier service that dissolved alongside the Holy Roman Empire).

This horn, in both variations, haunts the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, as she tries to make sense of a potential worldwide mail conspiracy. Her attempt to understand whether the horns truly stand for something parallel a larger quest to discern whether the world is held together by any larger order--some kind of invisible and unifying mechanism--or if she is simply the butt of an epically huge practical joke.

While there is certainly a lot more to discuss in regards to TCL49, quite frankly I'm a little exhausted just scratching the surface! So I'm putting Pynchon down for now, switching gears and taking on something with a decidedly different flavor for the next BOW: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. While more of a memoir than a novel, I think we can overlook this slight derivation, since it is in fact a memoir revolving around novels! Can't wait to discuss with ya'll next week.

PS-I was doing a little pre-blogging research and came across a website dedicated to the notoriously reclusive Pynchon. Interestingly, it has a whole section dedicated to his novels' various book covers (including nine covers for TCL49 from around the world), which I thought was kind of cool.

One Quarter of the Way Through the BOW Challenge

Well dear readers, we have reached a bit of a landmark here at NovelTease: as our thirteenth book-of-the-week has just been finished, we are officially one quarter of the way to 52 books--in other words, reading one book a week for an entire year. While this is by no means extraordinary, I have to admit, I'm pretty proud. Over the last three months, we have gone through thirteen great works, ranging from classics in the canon to contemporary thrillers, from favorite authors to fresh new voices. Now, while we still have a ways to go, I am pretty jazzed, and think that this mini-milestone warrants an invitation to all of my loyal readers to consider playing along, even if it is only now and again. I really would love hearing your feedback on the various BOWs, and am totally open to the idea of choosing future BOWs based on reader suggestions.

Okay, that's enough self-congratulation for one post! On to this week's BOW: Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. For those of you who have been following along over the last few weeks, you know I've recently read and enjoyed the first two installments of Larsson's Millienium trilogy, appreciating the brisk pace, smart twists, and well-developed characters. As the third and final chapter of Larsson's saga, TGWKTHN is similarly satisfying, even while it takes a different bent in terms of plot and pace.

Again, I have no interest in being a spoiler, but let's just say this installment focuses more on the "catching" part of the "catch the killer" concept, and shifts gears by focusing on unraveling a decades-old governmental conspiracy that is intrinsically linked with our heroine's own fate. While at times a little too tidy in terms of linkages (it's hard to think of a single loose end!), this thriller offers up exactly what it should: just enough surprises to keep the reader on her toes, and more than enough reasons to root for Lisbeth Salander--a truly unique and absorbing hero. I would definitely recommend this series to anyone looking for a engrossing read over the holidays--all of them make for great airplane reads (and I don't think you'll be at risk of crying).

So what's on the docket for next week's BOW? I think I'm going to shift gears pretty dramatically and take on Thomas Pynchon, a contemporary American author notorious for complex and reference-laden novels. However, since I'm only giving myself a week to take on this fearsome literary master, I decided I'd make it slightly easier on myself by selecting The Crying of Lot 49; at just under 160 pages, Pynchon once described this novel as a "short story, but with gland trouble." Well, we'll see how much trouble those glands give me!

BOW: So Brave, Young, and Handsome

First things first, what a great title! This week's BOW, Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome, borrows its name from the famous ballad, "The Cowboy's Lament." And that's not the only thing that Enger borrows: his story relies heavily on classic western and quest tropes, with its juxtaposition of romanticism and reality, likable "bad guys" and dastardly "good guys," affable, starry eyed boys and mysterious mexican girls.

While all of these conventions parallel characteristics often found in the classic western adventures, I have to admit, at times Enger's work feels like what it is--a contemporary attempt at a vintage style, rather too lacking in grit and too full of self-conscious references. In other words, while reading SBYAH, I never forgot that the book was published in 2008, even while the story takes place at some point in the early 20th century. This sensation was quite unlike my experience a few months ago reading All the Pretty Horses, which rang with an almost uncomfortable authenticity.

That complaint aside, Enger's second novel has plenty of interesting qualities, not the least of which is the various pairings that occur throughout the story--couples and compadres and combatants, too. If you are familiar with the concept of "foils" (think back to your 10th grade English classes, friends), there's a whole lot of that going on in this work, in which we see two unlike individuals paired together in order to learn more about a main character's personality in contrast to this secondary "other." I think this concept is especially well illustrated when Monte (the narrator and main character) starts his journey off with Glendon, the captivating hero with a troubled past on the road to redemption, and then later continues on his travels (against his wishes) with Siringo, the nefarious ex-Pinkerton agent on a quest for Glendon's hide. At the beginning of the book, the affable but rather impotent and grounded Monte stands in sharp relief to the brave and spirited Glendon, but his development as a character becomes visible when he travels with Siringo--we see him start to stand up for his friends, to exhibit moments of rebellion and loyalty that he might not have demonstrated before his friendship with Glendon.

While there are many more interesting aspects of SBYAH to discuss, I'm going to try to avoid rambling on too much, and just leave you with one other aspect that really intrigued me: the idea of names. At the novel's beginning, Monte's son, Redstart, claims: "He told me his name. He didn't want to say it, but I tricked him and out it came. You know what happens, once you get a person's name...why, then you have power over them." Now, almost every male character in this story has at least one alias--if not more--and these verbal masks act as both shields and obstacles; ultimately though, we realize that knowing someone's name is less about power and more about trust.

That's it from me on this one, but I would love to hear from those of you who have read Enger's second book--do you disagree with my indictment of artificiality? And what are some of the most interesting pairings? Please weigh in, and don't forget that this week's BOW is The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest!