Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

This fall I seem to be, unintentionally for the most part, reading a lot of the sorts of books where the first person narrator spends nearly the whole book alone rattling around an empty house lost in her thoughts and memories composing a novel that contains virtually no action and a lot of time in one character's head for better or for worse.  I have a great deal of real life book loving friends who would be bored to tears by such books.  As for me, I rather like them, as, it seems, do literary prize committees seeing as Molly Fox made the Orange Prize Shortlist in 2009 and Sanctuary Line (another recently read "thinky" book) got a long list nod for the Giller Prize in 2010.  Maybe it's because I spend rather a lot of time rattling around in my own head like said narrators so it's extra satisfying when their thoughts prove to be revelatory even if mine so often do not.

In Molly Fox's Birthday, the nameless narrator, a mostly successful playwright, is spending some time in the borrowed house of her friend, the famous stage actress Molly Fox, while she attempts to get a start on writing her next play.  Readers spend one day in the company of the playwright while she rattles around Molly's house casting about for inspiration for her new play and lost in her own thoughts of the past as she contemplates her relationships with Molly and an old college friend turned famed television art historian, Andrew Fforde.  The day in question, of course, is Molly's birthday, which also happens to be the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice.  Obviously, there's not much action, most of which involves the narrator buying food, preparing food, and eating food while she contemplates her friends and the past during the heat of a beautiful summer day.

That night she was communicating something of her deepest self in a way that is only possible for her when she is on stage.  Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invent as we go along, almost as a social reflex?  Perhaps it is instead the truest thing about us, and it is the revelation of it that is the problem; that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial.

Despite the lack of action, I was utterly taken in by the playwright's memories and musings. The narration seems tangential with the playwright first considering Molly and her ability to manifest a character in a play with her whole self then wandering to the playwright's past with Andrew whose serious studiousness she discovered late nights in the library at Trinity, and then her thoughts drift, as thoughts might, to a dinner she and Molly shared with the playwright's brother Tom, the priest, all told in a voice that is smart but never pretentious.   On it goes as thoughts do, meandering from one experience to the next until you find that you've been enveloped in a serious and unexpectedly focused contemplation of how identity is shaped by oneself, one's experience, and one's family and how truth and reality are often more accessible and tolerable in the fiction and artifice of plays (or books, I'm betting) than in the humdrum routines and conversations of our day to day lives.  Soon you'll realize you've been caught up in the story of an author who has an unusually keen perception of the bits and pieces of character that make up a person and an uncanny knack for putting them to the page and creating a focused theme that is compelling without being too serious or, dare we say, scholarly.   

"We were talking about her work and she said that there's a kind of truth that can only be expressed through artifice.  She said that what she wanted to convey to people through her work, more than anything else, was reality.  It was a question of showing something familiar but in a moment outside time; saying, 'Here's love, here's sorrow.  Do you recognise them?' I thought it was a good way of putting it."

I won't say I wasn't occasionally aware that the course of the narrator's reflection was subtly manipulating me toward the truths Madden was trying to illuminate with her story, but on the whole the playwright's meandering thoughts flowed in a surprisingly natural way with brief interruptions for the minutia of a day spent alone with the occasional happening that served as a natural redirect.  So taken in was I by the playwright's friends as magnified by her thoughts and the very true insights she seemed to easily arrive at through the course of the day that I hardly wanted it to end.  In Molly Fox's Birthday, Deirdre Madden manages to accomplish the rare feat of both telling us and showing us just how great a deal of truth there is to be found in fiction.  Highly recommended!

Loose Leafing: In Which I Love All the Things

Time:  5:35 p.m.  (And it's full dark!  The horror!)

Place:  Hunched over my desk (because my desk chair is the suck)

Eating: Low-fat string cheese (because the popcorn and candy at the movies wasn't quite enough).  But forget Sunday evening's sad string cheese and let's think back to yesterday evening when I went out with friends to a local fancy pantsy restaurant, Seasons on Main, where I splurged on a several course meal that included a perfectly done New York Strip steak and possibly the most delectable salted caramel cheesecake ever.  Extra points because it was such  a well-paced eating experience that I didn't even feel like I was going to pop by the end.  I could get into this fine dining stuff.  If my paycheck were bigger. 

Bored by:  How whenever I manage to write a blog post it's boring old book review (hence this imaginative post)

Watching:  Just came back from the movies where I wept my way through the end of About Time which I enjoyed absurdly much.  But don't you hate it when a movie makes you cry at the the theater?  Because you can't cry as much as you want to and you're embarrassed about crying as much as you did.  And I will watch it again sometime when I can cry as much as I very well desire. 

Reading:  For all my boredom with writing book reviews, I am really into reading books this year (said the book blogger, much to your shock, I'm sure).  I just finished and enjoyed Kristina Riggle's The Whole Golden World this week, and Random.org has since helpfully chosen Molly Fox's Birthday from shelf obscurity for my weekend reading, and despite the fact that it has no chapter breaks, which I usually find loathsome, I'm liking it very much.

Starting:  To explore using Good Reads.  I know I'm so late to the party, and judging from my experience so far, I'll always be a LibraryThing girl at heart, but I'm open to trying new things.  I think this is me should you want to befriend me.  Also, I'm finding the whole thing mildly perplexing and somewhat disorganized, so if you wanted to give me some tips and tricks and assorted supercool things to be done with Good Reads (that I'm probably missing) in the comments, please do, so I can stop feeling like a super-moron. You could also easily dissuade me from using it at all, if you're more that sort of person. ;-)

Promoting: The Literary Fiction Giveaway Blog Hop at Leeswammes' Blog.  I'm a total literary fiction nut, so I'm always excited to see what everyone's giving away and enter a few, too.  Someday, if I ever stop being a somewhat suckish blogger, I'm going to join up and give something away because I love it so much and I ought to give back even though I find giveaways to be a distasteful amount of work.  So much the more love I have for all you lit fiction bloggers who are giving away cool stuff!

Joining:  Agh, this week I joined the gym.  Okay, well not quite, but I purchased a half price 6 month membership voucher for the purpose of joining the gym.  My health insurance is supposed to reimburse me $100 toward it which will make it a mere $35 out of my own pocket which is just about the top of the range of money I would consider spending on a gym membership what with how I'm not a hundred percent sure I'll actually um, go, and get fit and all that.  Now that I've bought it, I'm rather a bit terrified about the whole endeavor what with how I've never joined a gym and am uncertain about working out in the presence of hordes of people.  Plus, I'll probably injure myself within the first few days.  *paces nervously*

Surpassing:  My total books read last year (already)!  You will be more impressed by this if I don't tell you the paltry amount of books I read last year.  Otherwise, you'll slap a pitying look on your face, shake your virtual head, and pat me on my virtual head in the patronizing way of someone who surpassed my total books read last year in, um....February.  Not that you'd ever really do that, but I fear you'd be sorely tempted if I were to divulge such information.

Dreading: The coming work week.  Last week was one of those weeks that I would have danced/skipped/shouted for joy my way down the hall by the end of my shift on Friday evening....if I only would have had a shred of energy left for such behavior.  Instead, I forgot where I parked my car, got off the shuttle bus two stops early, was vaguely humiliated, and walked the other mile or so to my car in the dark in a howling wind.  Yeah, can't wait to get back to work again.

And, I think that's all I have to say on the subject of this week. 

What are you up to this fine Sunday? 

Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman by Minka Pradelski

Young Tsippy Silberberg is more than a little surprised when her aunt in Tel Aviv passes away and leaves her an inheritance.  When she arrives to claim it, she's even more puzzled that it consists of an incomplete fish service in a suitcase.  As she sits in her beach-side hotel room trying to puzzle out the meaning of having silverware to serve something she refuses to even eat, her journey gets even stranger with a knock on the door.  Behind that knock is Mrs. Bella Kugelman, a Holocaust survivor like Tsippy's parents, who is determined to keep her hometown in Poland alive through stories that she insists on telling to Tsippy and anyone else who will listen.  Much to her surprise, it's this odd and persistent woman and her stories that will help Tsippy unearth the meaning behind her aunt's bizarre bequest.

To get to the heart of things, Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman is kind of a weird book.  Tsippy is a bizarre narrator prone to flights of fancy and impulsiveness that hardly make sense.  Her bizarre diet centers on frozen vegetables for reasons that aren't entirely clear.  The whole premise of an aged survivor materializing in her hotel room every day to tell stories of the old country regardless of whether Tsippy wants to hear them or not requires a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief.  It's easy to see why Mrs. Kugelman is probably not a book that everyone is going to like.  That said, I liked it quite a lot indeed.

Despite her oddities, Tsippy is an interesting character who has grown up in the shadow of her parents' silence over the terrible events of the Holocaust they survived.  Her bizarre eating habits seemed to be grounded in a desperate need to get her emotionally repressed parents to say anything even if it was just to scold her for her increasingly bizarre behavior.  I came to terms with odd Tsippy Silberberg as the story's primary narrator, but what I really loved were the stories Mrs. Kugelman came to tell Tsippy.  Determined to keep her Polish town of Bedzin and its denizens alive long after the Holocaust destroyed it, Mrs. Kugelman is happy to tell anyone who will listen the stories of her childhood and the many characters that populated it.  Her stories both satisfy Tsippy's hunger for some sense of her past and draw readers into the lives of mischievous kids, extremely religious adults, lovers, scam artists, businessmen, bakers and grocers and porters who populate an above-average small town that stood on the precipice of its own destruction and never knew.

Mrs. Kugelman's stories call to mind the sort of small-time legends that populate any town or even any one family, and Pradelski's choice to focus on the life of the town in its glory days before the horrors of the Holocaust came calling is a refreshing departure.  Minka Pradelski is a sociologist who has spent considerable time exploring the psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors, and her depiction of the very willful disconnect Tsippy's guilt-ridden father has made between the painful past and the promising future he hopes for his daughter definitely seems to spring from that knowledge.  However, as Tsippy and Mrs. Kugelman's tale shows us, it might just be that the very stories survivors avoid are the ones that stand to heal a new generation.  Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman is unexpectedly touching novel that shows the value of knowing our past even as we plunge into the uncertain future, and one that I would highly recommend if you don't mind reading a book that's just a bit outside the box.

(Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for my honest review).

Clarity by Kim Harrington

Well, this is bewildering.  Here I am having had my Kindle for almost a year, and I think....I think this is going to be my first legitimate review of an ebook.  LOL!  It turns out if books aren't taking up a significant amount of real estate on the surface of my desk, I kind of, um, forget to review them.  I managed to finish Clarity by Kim Harrington in the last moments before falling asleep during the Readathon, so I'm going to attempt to review it real quick before it falls into the sad abyss of (e)books I've forgotten to review.

Okay, so, Clarity "Clare" Fern has kind of an unusual family life.  You see, she, her older brother Perry, and her mother Starla all have some form of psychic gift, and they make their living selling readings to the tourists that frequent the Cape Cod town where they live.  Perry's a medium who can sense the presence of dead loved ones, Starla is a telepath who can read the thoughts of her customers, and touching recently touched objects communicates visions of the past to Clare herself.  It's a nice normal summer where Clare only has to worry about keeping her remorseful cheating ex at bay and Perry has only to consider which tourist girl to bed next, until tragedy strikes and Clare and her gifts are pressed into service in an investigation of the first murder to take place in Eastport in years, a murder for which her womanizing brother has become the primary suspect.

Wow, did I have mixed feelings about this book.  I'll start with the bad so we can end up on a good note.  The love triangle reveals itself within the first few chapters.  Meh, love triangles.  Suspension of disbelief is at a premium here, too, as we're supposed to believe that the mayor's son, Clare's ex Justin (hot, sweet, and still clamoring to have her back), the newly arrived detective's son Gabriel (hot, mysterious, and cynical about Clare's gifts but also, of course, totally attracted to her), and psychic Clare are practically independently being given the reins of a behind-the-scenes murder investigation.  Clare and Gabriel are poking around crime scenes and dead bodies all on their own with only a passing nod to the danger of the situation and very little consideration for the vagaries of, you know, procuring actual admissible evidence.  Also, I prefer my mysteries just a tiny bit less contrived, but maybe it all boils down to Clarity being just a bit too Y for my A. 

Enough complaining, though, because there are plenty of things I really liked about Clarity not the least of which is Clarity herself.  Clarity is a fierce heroine with a wicked temper on her.  She's loyal, protective, and not afraid to unleash an angry retort or a sharp elbow on somebody who's harassing her for her "freakdom."  She doesn't always make the best decisions, but she's usually got her heart in the right place when she's making them.  They mystery itself did have me absorbed, and Harrington does a great job of introducing her entire cast of characters such that any of them could be sketchy enough to be the sort that commits a murder or...they could be totally normal decent people!  Even Clare's sweet, if a little foolish, lady's man of a brother doesn't escape legitimate scrutiny.  Harrington had me going until the bitter end making me think it might be this person or this other person when really it was that person (er, behold the wonder of the spoiler free review! LOL), and I really didn't see it coming until a page or two before Clare saw it coming.   

All in all, Clarity had its weaknesses, including a kind of weak series-starter ending, because it's YA, of course it's part of a series, which I wish I would have remembered before I started because I am so bad at keeping up with series.  That said, I was totally involved in the mystery and *mumbles* maybe the love triangle, too *grumble, grumble, cough.* It made for a very quick and absorbing Readathon book, and I'll surely seek out the sequel, a few years after I've forgotten every important thing I need to remember about this book because I'm good like that ("Hi, my name is Megan and I suck at series books.").

(Muah!  No disclaimer, for I surely have purchased this during one of my cheap ebook buying sprees of which there are a great many!)

Readathon Wrap-Up

Read:  Clarity by Kim Harrington

It's been __149__ pages and __9__ cheers since my last update.

Total Cheers: 23

Cumulative Pages Read: 301

Books Completed: 1

Eating?: Probably more of those tiny candy bars.  They might be worse than crack, if only because they're so easy to acquire.  =P

Despite my lack of updates, I actually persevered almost through Hour 17 (I think?).  I actually finished Clarity by Kim Harrington despite my having already come to terms with how I probably wouldn't finish a book since I wasn't being very book monogamous and was cheering and may have gotten distracted by watching the last few episodes for The Walking Dead so I could be ready for the new season tonight.  So, I think, for the first time in my personal Readathon history, I actually did better than I thought I would, so here's to having lower expectations and having more fun on Readathon day.  In the end, it all works out!

And the end of a event meme, of course...

1. Which hour was most daunting for you? - 17, I was definitely falling asleep, but I propped up my eyelids open with a few toothpicks and finished my book in the end. 
2. Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? - Clarity by Kim Harrington made for a great 'thon book.  Very quick read, engaging mystery, fun premise!
3. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? - Nope, I think I may have had one of my best 'thons ever this time around, so keep on doing what you're doing awesome organizers! :D
4. What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? - The cheerleading seemed to be very well organized to help every reader get at least a little encouragement, at least from what I can see - I hope it's true! 
5. How many books did you read? - 1 and a....quarter? 
6. What were the names of the books you read? - Clarity and some of Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
7. Which book did you enjoy most? - Both were great, but Clarity's the only one I finished.  Neil Gaiman's short stories were great for an occasional change of pace.
8. Which did you enjoy least? - n/a
9. If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? - Um, keep being awesome?  All the cheerleaders I interacted with as a cheerleader and as a reader were very enthusiastic and committed.  I guess each cheerleading team had its own captain this time, and in my team (Go Team Fox!), Michael from Buried in Print did a great job getting us organized and keeping the participating reader list updated so we could maximize our time cheering.  My advice?  Sign up to cheer - it's fun and rewarding!  I "met" lots of people and lots came to visit me!
10. How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? - Extremely likely, and I think I'd sign up to be both again.  It was a nice balance!

Thanks again to the organizers of the Readathon for honoring Dewey and for giving us all a chance (or an excuse!) to do what we love together for a day.  And thanks again to everybody who stopped by to cheer me on while I was reading yesterday, you all made a great day even greater!