Cannonball Read 3 - Review #10 - Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

I have never read any of Murakami's books, and probably wouldn't have, as there are always too many books to read. However, it is the April selection for my book club, so Murakami it was. Set in the late 1960s in Tokyo, the book is told from the perspective of Toru Watanabe, who is looking back on his days as a college student and the intense relationships he had then. He is drawn to Naoko, a severely depressed friend from his high-school days who was childhood sweethearts with his best friend Kizuki, who committed suicide when they were seventeen. The shared grief over Kizuki draws Toru and Naoko together, and Toru struggles to help Naoko while she struggles with her mental illness. Toru is also drawn to Midori, a spirited young woman he meets in one of his classes, and he tries to navigate these intense relationships and do the right thing while dealing with his own pain and detachment from the rest of his carefee classmates. The characters are all wonderful. There are no "normal" people that Toru is friends with. Everyone from his roommate to his girlfriend all have unique quirks and serious problems, but while Toru acknowledges them, he does not make a big fuss of how strange they are. He calmly loves and understands the troubled people in his life, probably because his own pain makes him more aware and sensitive to that of others, a feeling I can relate to. The novel explores grief, mental illness, relationships, love, and the pain of growing up in a calm and deep way, and no one is a cliche or caricature. We follow the lives of a few deeply flawed people in Toru's life as he tries to love them. Except for many references to music and books from the era, the novel is rather timeless. It's a beautiful story of imperfect people trying their best to be happy, or peaceful, or alive.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #9 - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

It took me a while to finish the old boy, but here I am. Catch-22 is a whopper of a satire, and Heller does an amazing job of capturing the frustration and impotence of bureaucracy and the horror and senselessness of war. The novel takes place towards the end of WWII, and centers around Yossarian, an American soldier who is disaffected with the war effort and is constantly trying to figure out how to stay out of harm's way while the powers that be keep raising the number of missions before the soldiers can go home. Yossarian is our eyes as the reader, and seems to be the only one who really sees the stupidity of bureaucratic processes and how ineffectual a big effort like an international war seems from the front lines. While the book is very funny, there is this undercurrent of tension and darkness that really comes to a head towards the end of the book. The reader also gets to know Yossarian's friends and fellow soldiers, many of whom meet less than satisfying ends, as will happen when on the front lines of a major war. I really felt Yossarian's rage and frustration, and his struggle with wanting to save himself while also being loyal to his sense of morality. The book flips back and forth from past to present, sometimes returning to the same event from someone else's perspective, but the timeline is not terribly complicated, so it isn't bothersome. Catch-22 is so expertly written because Heller makes the reader just as anxious and angry as his main character and makes you feel something genuine amidst all that satire. It took me a while to finish, but I'm glad I took the time.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #8 - Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

So I decided to read this book, too, after reading Julia Child's memoir, My Life In France, and of course seeing the movie Julie and Julia last year. I remember when the movie came out that a lot of people loved the Julia portion of the film, but felt like the Julie character, played by Amy Adams, was kind of selfish and unlikable. Well they will REALLY feel like that after reading the book. Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell, a 29-year-old secretary who is dissatisfied with her job and anxious about turning thirty, as she feels directionless and unhappy about where she is in life. She decides that she needs something to work for, a project, so she decides to cook her way through Julia Child's famous cook book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year, while writing about it on a blog.

It sounds like a great premise, and I tried really hard to like Julie, but honestly, it was a lot of whining and bitching and passing a lot of judgments on other people whose personalities we only get a shallow glimpse of from her perspective. She's constantly making these jabs at her Republican co-workers, but never really explains why they deserve to be put down, and she just kind of makes these vague "I'm a Democrat, they're Republicans" digs that don't really work. It also doesn't really flow. She'll go from talking about the sex lives of her single friends to making aspic for dinner, and I never really get where she's going. Is that really the best way to liven up the cooking stories? It just read really weird. I like a good memoir, but this wasn't one. She's constantly making life hard for her sweet, doting husband, and she recognizes how big of a jerk she is in many, many situations, only to keep doing it over and over again. Listen, you look like a bigger jerk if you're aware of how horrible you are being and do nothing to try to be better.

I was just really turned off by Julie, which isn't a great thing if the book is in her voice and all about her exploits. If I had just read her blog as this project was happening, then I probably would have just been reading funny stories about her cooking disasters and not as much of the misguided personal anecdotes and hissy fits. Whatever, it only took me a few days to read. Moving on.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #7 - One Day by David Nicholls

I've been hearing about this book and found out it's been adapted to a movie with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, and the premise is interesting, so I thought I'd check it out. The story centers around Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, and each chapter shows a snapshot of their relationship on the same day, each year, for about twenty years. The book starts out with them on the night of their graduation from college at the University of Edinburgh, where they hook up at a party. Then their lives diverge, but they stay friends, keeping in touch while Dexter travels the world and Emma tries to figure out what to do with herself. She received high marks in school, but is utterly directionless. Dexter is just as directionless, partying and sleeping with many, many different women. Over the years, we see Dexter and Emma's lives and relationship change, as they are wont to do. Dexter is kind of a cad who gets swept up in the glamour and flash of his career in television, but makes decisions which sometimes leave him in the middle of an empty and unsatisfying existence. Emma is a loyal and grounding presence, who knows everything about him and calls him out on his bad behavior. Emma is smart, romantic, but self-loathing and unsure of herself in her youth. Both see the good in each other that they can't see in themselves, and that is what makes them such necessary people in each other's lives.

One Day was satisfying, without too many cliches, and with well-rounded and realistic characters. I have little patience for the trite novels of Nicholas Sparks and his ilk, and One Day is what all of that nonsense is trying to be. Nicholls writes about this very intimate, important long relationship so well. The changes the characters go through and the hurdles their relationship faces over twenty years are so realistic. I really don't want to give too much away, as waiting to see the changes each year brings on July 15th was a lot of the fun of reading this novel. As Dexter and Emma develop as people, their relationship changes, but they continue to be in each others lives. I hightly recommend this book. I'm glad I jumped on this particular bandwagon.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #6 - My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme

I grew up with a gourmand as a father. He loves cooking, eating, French wine, and his favorite is French food. I have known who Julia Child was since I was very wee, and my dad's favorite moment from her television show was when she teaches how to buy a proper French baguette from the store. If you balance it over your arm and it droops, it's terrible. That's it I guess. But when she demonstrates this, the bread droops, and she hurls if offstage bellowing in her strange accent, "This is a TERRIBLE loaf of bread!" Everything about Julie is straight-forward, passionate, and joyous. My Life in France is told in Julia's energetic, enthusiastic and bold voice. She lived her life with such forward momentum, and her book is a joy to read.

Child gives a bit of background of her life, but the book really starts when she and her husband, Paul, move to Paris for his government job in the late 1940s. As Julia notes, this is really when her life started. With a lot of time on her hands, and inspired by the delicious French cuisine that she and Paul eagerly consume, Julia decides she wants to learn to cook French food. She enrolls in cooking classes at the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and learns quickly, practicing at home by cooking for Paul and their friends. Julie doesn't stop her education there, however. She shops with locals, asks questions of friends, restaraunteurs, bakers, butchers, and all kinds of French people about the culture, history, and science of all types of French food. She is bright and inquisitive and passionate about the culture of French food, and it makes her some wonderful friends. Eventually, two of her friends ask her to help them with a cook book they are making to bring French recipes to an American audience. This book is many years in the making, but it eventually becomes her famed "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." This book is what leads her to her career in food television.

The book is amazingly detailed, presumably thanks to the letters she wrote to her friends and family over the years. The book is written in her conversational and frank tone, like she's reflecting with a friend on her many adventures. Her love for food and France shine through in her lovingly detailed descriptions of the places she visits and the food she cooks and eats. Her relationships are shown in detail as well, especially that with her loving and supportive husband, Paul. Julia Child lived a life that I admire and envy. She loved her friends and family, she spent her adult life devoted to learning about food and cooking technique, and she found a place where she truly felt at home. Anyone who loves France or French food should read this book, and if you're interested in reading about interesting and accomplished women, the same. It was a great read.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #5 - The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

In the last few years, there was a project called the Canongate Myth Series where writers from all over the world updated, expanded on, and/or fictionalized myths in short novel form. The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood's telling of what Penelope from The Odyssey was up to for the twenty years Odysseus was gone. While Odysseus was fighting in the Trojan war and having adventures on his way home, Penelope was struggling to raise her son and evade the many suitors who wanted to marry her for her fortune. In this story, Penelope is friendless except for her twelve young maids who she raises like daughters. In the evenings, they all sit with her as she weaves a shroud for her father-in-law, gossipping and teasing, keeping her company. At the end of The Odyssey, the twelve maids are all hung for supposed treason. Margaret Atwood tells their story as well, via Penelope's story told from the afterworld.

The book is short, more like a novella, and the tone is very modern and sardonic. Penelope, after thousands of years, is finally telling her side of the story as she floats around the shadowy underworld, as friendless as she was while she was living. She tells about her arranged marriage to Odysseus when she was fifteen, the controlling women in her new home who never let her make and decisions of her own, and the lonelieness and humiliation she felt while her husband was off sleeping with goddesses and doing who knows what for twenty years while she thanklessly toiled at home, keeping her suitors at bay and raising a bratty teenaged son. Atwood's Penelope is self-aware, sad, but strong and smart. She is utterly powerless, as everyone in her life treats her like a prop. She even explains how a quiet death would be of value to multiple people in her life so that they wouldn't have to deal with her and could just have her treasures with no interference. Her only comfort are her twelve young maids who act as her friends and confidantes. But they are unjustly slaughtered while Penelope is sleeping, and she is left alone again.

I love the idea of giving Penelope a voice, a personality, and showing Odysseus' weaknesses as a proud and selfish man. He got to travel the world for twenty years and have songs written about him, and myths told of his exploits. Penelope didn't get any songs, and she never got to leave her castle. But Penelope is the real hero. She was faithful and strong, and she did the right thing, even though no one did the right thing by her. Atwood gives her the chance to get some peace by telling her story, even though it is long after the fact.

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #4 - How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley

There are a lot of people out there who think they're funny and interesting, and they have blogs or Twitter accounts where they write about their lives. Some of them are legitimately amusing, but let's face it, most of them aren't. Both of Sloane Crosley's collections of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, read like a friend telling you about funny, absurd, and out of the ordinary stories from her life in her twenties...your eloquent, self-deprecating, and genuinely likable friend.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake was laugh-out-loud funny, full of absurd stories of a woman in her early twenties trying to figure life out with mixed results. However, in How Did You Get This Number, there's a little more poignancy with her humor, because as we get older, the stakes get a little higher. Our mistakes carry a little more weight, and we're a little more on our own when things go wrong. I recognize myself in these stories, also as a twenty-something out of college and trying to figure out my life and facing my inadequacies. Crosley is a great writer, deftly weaving so many funny, ridiculous observations into these small vignettes. She writes about searching for the perfect apartment, strangers' bathroom habits, and the fate of her many family pets, but at the same time is telling you so much more about herself, the people she knows, and the people we all know. I don't want to get too detailed about any of the individual stories, because they're so great when you don't quite know what you're getting into.

Crosley's writing is a pleasure to read. She never struck me as smug or self-indulgent like so many can seem while writing about their lives for everyone to read. She's that girl who can give you all of these reasons why she's not cool or together, but really, she's the coolest person in the room. Who wants to hear Elizabeth Gilbert go on about her perfect journey to happiness? A lot of people, apparently, but I like Sloane Crosley and the glimpses into her own flawed, funny, familiar path to being grown-up.