I’m not such a fan of crime fiction. So when my sister suggested I read the first of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum bounty hunter series, I had my doubts. I ended up reading “One for the money” within a day and a half. I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t so much that it was riveting, exceptionally well written or memorable. It was just a ripping good read: funny, quirky and highly entertaining. I quickly followed with “Two for the dough” and “Three to get ready”.
Since then fifteen books have been written in the series and I have read them all. I don’t think I could even recount the plot line of any of them. I just read “Finger lickin’ fifteen” and let’s see, oh yes, it is about a famous chef who gets decapitated and….it doesn’t matter really. While they might be formula driven, they are never dull.
The series is set in Trenton, New Jersey and revolves around the central character Stephanie Plum. She works as a bond enforcement officer and sometimes helps the enigmatic and incredibly sexy Ranger in his security business. She’s in love with the cop Joe Morrelli, but theirs is an on-again-off-again relationship. She’s madly attracted to Ranger but he’s not the marrying kind. Her sidekick Lula is a 200 pound ex ‘ho who insists on wearing lycra and needs to regularly eat fried chicken and donuts to settle her stomach. Grandma Mazur lives with her parents and is a gun-toting-thrill-seeking feisty old lady whose highlight of the week is the latest viewing at the funeral parlour. Then there’s Stephanie’s long suffering mother who turns to her hidden vodka bottle to help deal with her daughter’s dangerous exploits and her father who’s either in front of the TV. or at the dinner table mumbling under his breath. And don’t forget Rex, Stephanie’s Hamster who spends his time in a cage on her kitchen counter eating, sleeping and occasionally being saved from bad guys.
I’ve never been to Trenton but Evanovich manages to bring it alive. Her descriptions of middle class suburbia and Stark Street, the epicenter of drug and crime hell, are vivid. But it is her characters I love the best. Her dialogue is fast paced, amusing and true to character. Lula has some of the best lines in the book and it is easy to hear her voice. It is her ability to create characters that evoke such a sense of time and place that make reading her series worthwhile.
I’m surprised that the books have not yet spawned a movie or at the least, a television series. Die hard fans are very opinionated as to who should play which character. For the record I would have Sandra Bullock as Stephanie, Jon Bon Jovi as Joe Morrelli, Vin Diesel as Ranger, Ann Morgan Guilbert as Grandma Mazur (she played Grandma Yetta on The Nanny). Lula is a tougher one. Originally I thought of Queen Latifah but I think that she’s not big enough, nor crass enough. Think Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Doolittle and I think we’re getting somewhere.
Buy Janet Evanovich books
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
My top books
Here is my own list of top books. They are not in order of preference except Desiree would probably be one of my all time favourites, which is why it appears in the top position. The list is by no means exhaustive. There are currently 43 books listed but I would hope to add to this list throughout my life.
Desiree, Annemarie Selinko
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Desparate Characters, Paula Fox
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
2001, Arthur C. Clarke
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Huis Clos (No Exit), Jean Paul Sartre
The Tempest, Shakespeare
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells
Anna Karenin, Tolstoy
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
I thought my father was God, Paul Auster
The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
I captured the castle, Dodie Smith
Shogun, James Clavell
The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler
River God, Wilbur Smith
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell
Ulysses, James Joyce
Haunted, Chuck Palahuniuk
Master Class, David Pownall
Desiree, Annemarie Selinko
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Desparate Characters, Paula Fox
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
2001, Arthur C. Clarke
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Huis Clos (No Exit), Jean Paul Sartre
The Tempest, Shakespeare
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells
Anna Karenin, Tolstoy
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
I thought my father was God, Paul Auster
The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
I captured the castle, Dodie Smith
Shogun, James Clavell
The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler
River God, Wilbur Smith
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell
Ulysses, James Joyce
Haunted, Chuck Palahuniuk
Master Class, David Pownall
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Review of Eat, pray, love
It’s been endorsed by the likes of Julia Roberts, Annie Proulx, Minnie Driver and the doyenne of book clubs, Oprah Winfrey. Humph, it must be good! Maybe I was just in the wrong stage of life when I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, pray, love. After all, I’ve chosen the path that Gilbert so passionately rejected; marriage, mortgage and babies. But even recognising how divergent our lives are, I couldn’t help but feel that the book had been over-hyped.
If you don’t read it too critically then yes, it is an enjoyable tale of one woman’s odyssey to heal herself following a devastating divorce. I applaud her courage in stepping back from a life that was so obviously making her desperately unhappy and embarking on what can only be described as an extraordinary journey. In a nutshell, she goes to Italy to eat and experience pleasure, India to pray and heal emotionally, and Indonesia to find equilibrium but instead (or, and?) finds love.
I don’t doubt that Gilbert is a talented writer. She is often able to evoke a sense of place and people vividly, but her most compelling portrayals are revealed when she writes unselfconsciously. It is for this reason that I enjoyed her peripheral characters more than the ones she works so hard to weave into her story. Her description of the young girl she meets in the Ashram had more meaning than the philosophy-quipping Richard from Texas. The avid Italian soccer fan hurling abuse at the players and umpires is more compelling than her drawn out tragic retelling of Yudhi, her Javanese friend’s tale. Richard and Yudhi seemed more like caricatures than characters.
Her writing is also at times sentimental and, frankly, uninteresting. Do I really care that she ate the best pizza in Sicily? I cringed at her gushy-feel-all-good-about-myself description of holding a conversation in Italian with a street vendor. It reminded me of the cardinal sin many a tourist cum travel writer makes when posting long tomes for the poor suckers back at home. You might be completely enamoured by what you’ve seen and done, but that doesn’t mean your reader needs to be confronted with every tiny detail. Finally, her attempt at using her favourite Italian word attraversiamo as a literary linchpin seemed to be figuratively and literally tacked on at the end.
I was also bothered by her portrayal of her ex-husband. She appears at first to want to paint him fairly. He is, after all, a living breathing person. She admits that it takes two to make a marriage fail. Yet she ultimately comes across like a woman scorned when we quickly learn that he is responsible for so much of her emotional and financial pain and suffering. While that might be the truth as far as she sees it, he must feel a sense of betrayal when his ex’s side of the story is a world wide best seller.
Her medicine woman friend in Bali comes off badly too. It was incredibly charitable and well intentioned of Gilbert to raise money to buy Wayan, a divorcee with three children, a house. And it must have been intensely frustrating to realise that Wayan was apparently trying to get more money out of her. She calls Wayan’s bluff by telling her that all her friends who donated money think that she is a bullshitter and that they’re angry at having donated money for a house that still had not been bought. According to Gilbert, after months of dithering Wayan is suddenly able to buy land, organise builders and sign contracts all in half a day. I know that Gilbert wanted us to have sympathy for her as she negotiated her way around this dilemma but I couldn’t help but think about Wayan. Does Gilbert think that she’ll never read her book?
Insensitivity to those in her life was not the only problem. While she provides very interesting facts about Bali’s history and culture, she sometimes slips (unwittingly I would imagine) into ugly tourist mode. On arriving at her luxury hotel in Bali she declares it to be “one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.” Yikes. When she accompanies her medicine man to a baby ceremony, she describes him thus; “Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event – a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel.” Double yikes.
Which leads me to my biggest gripe about the book. Gilbert confesses that she’s not had much luck in love and that her string of failed relationships is the source of her deep sadness. It’s the damn reason why she set off on this odyssey in the first place. So, why oh why does she spend half the book focusing on men? She opens her story with “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” That should have set off a warning bell for me right there! “Am I young and beautiful?” she opens chapter 90 with. “I thought I was old and divorced.” She spends precious meditation time in India fretting over her rebound relationship with David. And then there’s Ketut. The one who predicted she would one day return to Bali, who opened his home to her, offered her wisdom and advice. It seemed to me that once the sexy and beguiling Felipe appeared on the scene, poor old Ketut gets unceremoniously tossed aside. Spiritual journey be damned. I’ve got a Brazilian to bed!
In a strange way it reminds me a bit of Sex and the City. Another example of a bold idea sold out to the happy ending. Or am I just being harsh? When Gilbert appeared on Oprah, the relationship with Felipe was still going strong. And her story should not be considered a “how to” manual for the navel-gazing generation. She’d mended her broken heart, ate some great food, sat in the palm of God and found love. Good for her! Clearly it’s what many readers want. Resolution. A neat and tidy ending. Her story is ultimately an intensely personal one. There is a part of me that wished she’d kept it that way.
If you don’t read it too critically then yes, it is an enjoyable tale of one woman’s odyssey to heal herself following a devastating divorce. I applaud her courage in stepping back from a life that was so obviously making her desperately unhappy and embarking on what can only be described as an extraordinary journey. In a nutshell, she goes to Italy to eat and experience pleasure, India to pray and heal emotionally, and Indonesia to find equilibrium but instead (or, and?) finds love.
I don’t doubt that Gilbert is a talented writer. She is often able to evoke a sense of place and people vividly, but her most compelling portrayals are revealed when she writes unselfconsciously. It is for this reason that I enjoyed her peripheral characters more than the ones she works so hard to weave into her story. Her description of the young girl she meets in the Ashram had more meaning than the philosophy-quipping Richard from Texas. The avid Italian soccer fan hurling abuse at the players and umpires is more compelling than her drawn out tragic retelling of Yudhi, her Javanese friend’s tale. Richard and Yudhi seemed more like caricatures than characters.
Her writing is also at times sentimental and, frankly, uninteresting. Do I really care that she ate the best pizza in Sicily? I cringed at her gushy-feel-all-good-about-myself description of holding a conversation in Italian with a street vendor. It reminded me of the cardinal sin many a tourist cum travel writer makes when posting long tomes for the poor suckers back at home. You might be completely enamoured by what you’ve seen and done, but that doesn’t mean your reader needs to be confronted with every tiny detail. Finally, her attempt at using her favourite Italian word attraversiamo as a literary linchpin seemed to be figuratively and literally tacked on at the end.
I was also bothered by her portrayal of her ex-husband. She appears at first to want to paint him fairly. He is, after all, a living breathing person. She admits that it takes two to make a marriage fail. Yet she ultimately comes across like a woman scorned when we quickly learn that he is responsible for so much of her emotional and financial pain and suffering. While that might be the truth as far as she sees it, he must feel a sense of betrayal when his ex’s side of the story is a world wide best seller.
Her medicine woman friend in Bali comes off badly too. It was incredibly charitable and well intentioned of Gilbert to raise money to buy Wayan, a divorcee with three children, a house. And it must have been intensely frustrating to realise that Wayan was apparently trying to get more money out of her. She calls Wayan’s bluff by telling her that all her friends who donated money think that she is a bullshitter and that they’re angry at having donated money for a house that still had not been bought. According to Gilbert, after months of dithering Wayan is suddenly able to buy land, organise builders and sign contracts all in half a day. I know that Gilbert wanted us to have sympathy for her as she negotiated her way around this dilemma but I couldn’t help but think about Wayan. Does Gilbert think that she’ll never read her book?
Insensitivity to those in her life was not the only problem. While she provides very interesting facts about Bali’s history and culture, she sometimes slips (unwittingly I would imagine) into ugly tourist mode. On arriving at her luxury hotel in Bali she declares it to be “one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.” Yikes. When she accompanies her medicine man to a baby ceremony, she describes him thus; “Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event – a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel.” Double yikes.
Which leads me to my biggest gripe about the book. Gilbert confesses that she’s not had much luck in love and that her string of failed relationships is the source of her deep sadness. It’s the damn reason why she set off on this odyssey in the first place. So, why oh why does she spend half the book focusing on men? She opens her story with “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” That should have set off a warning bell for me right there! “Am I young and beautiful?” she opens chapter 90 with. “I thought I was old and divorced.” She spends precious meditation time in India fretting over her rebound relationship with David. And then there’s Ketut. The one who predicted she would one day return to Bali, who opened his home to her, offered her wisdom and advice. It seemed to me that once the sexy and beguiling Felipe appeared on the scene, poor old Ketut gets unceremoniously tossed aside. Spiritual journey be damned. I’ve got a Brazilian to bed!
In a strange way it reminds me a bit of Sex and the City. Another example of a bold idea sold out to the happy ending. Or am I just being harsh? When Gilbert appeared on Oprah, the relationship with Felipe was still going strong. And her story should not be considered a “how to” manual for the navel-gazing generation. She’d mended her broken heart, ate some great food, sat in the palm of God and found love. Good for her! Clearly it’s what many readers want. Resolution. A neat and tidy ending. Her story is ultimately an intensely personal one. There is a part of me that wished she’d kept it that way.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Welcome to Danielle's Best Books Blog!
So why a blog about best books?
Back in 1987 my favourite English teacher, Mrs White, presented our class with a list of "must reads". I poured over this list happily ticking off the ones I'd already read and excited at the prospect of having been given some direction in developing my reading interests further. Since then whenever I've come across a "must have read", "top 100 books", "all time favourite books" list, I'm taken back to that class and the inspiration I felt. Twenty odd years later and with four years studying literature at Uni under my belt, I think I'm also fairly able to check the list with a more discerning eye and not just blindly vow to read them all. Then it occurred to me, why not create my own list?
A couple of weeks ago I sat and with a blank Excel spreadsheet before me, I started my own list. Not an easy task I can assure you! I scanned my bookshelf taking note of the books I'd loved, but what about books I'd borrowed from the library or from friends? Slowly but surely I compiled my list.
There are around 40 books on the list and it is by no means exhaustive. My reading days are far from done! The only criteria I set for inclusion is that it must have been enjoyable to read and have moved me in some way: made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, made me want to read it again.
Although I've read many books that are deemed "classics" or "high end", I think it's fair to say that some of these books were a chore to read. I would wade through them because it was required of me but could hardly wait to reach the end. While my list certainly includes classics, it also includes books that could be considered "popular" or even (God forbid) "commercial".
When it comes to books, can you ever read widely enough?
So why a blog about best books?
Back in 1987 my favourite English teacher, Mrs White, presented our class with a list of "must reads". I poured over this list happily ticking off the ones I'd already read and excited at the prospect of having been given some direction in developing my reading interests further. Since then whenever I've come across a "must have read", "top 100 books", "all time favourite books" list, I'm taken back to that class and the inspiration I felt. Twenty odd years later and with four years studying literature at Uni under my belt, I think I'm also fairly able to check the list with a more discerning eye and not just blindly vow to read them all. Then it occurred to me, why not create my own list?
A couple of weeks ago I sat and with a blank Excel spreadsheet before me, I started my own list. Not an easy task I can assure you! I scanned my bookshelf taking note of the books I'd loved, but what about books I'd borrowed from the library or from friends? Slowly but surely I compiled my list.
There are around 40 books on the list and it is by no means exhaustive. My reading days are far from done! The only criteria I set for inclusion is that it must have been enjoyable to read and have moved me in some way: made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, made me want to read it again.
Although I've read many books that are deemed "classics" or "high end", I think it's fair to say that some of these books were a chore to read. I would wade through them because it was required of me but could hardly wait to reach the end. While my list certainly includes classics, it also includes books that could be considered "popular" or even (God forbid) "commercial".
When it comes to books, can you ever read widely enough?
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