I wish I lived in a P.G. Wodehouse book

Aside from the fact that Hugh Laurie might be there being an adorably dense Wooster, the whole lawyer thing seems an easier gig than in real life:

"But I don't know anything about the law. What shall I say to him?"
"That's all right. I've been studying up a bit. As far as I can gather, this legal advice business is quite simple. Anything that isn't a tort is a misdemeanour. You've simply got to tell old Bennett that in your opinion the whole thing looks jolly like a tort."
"What's the word again?"
"Tort."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know. Probably nobody knows. But it's a safe card to play. Tort. Don't forget it."
"Tort. Right ho!"

Wodehouse, Three Men and a Maid 150 (A.L. Burt Co. 1922)

Kitchen Chinese

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah


I really should have known better. I thought it would be a novel about food -- it's called Kitchen Chinese and was written by a food writer. But it's actually chick lit. Reading the back cover, I realize I should have seen the signs: "Isabelle Lee things she knows everything about Chinese cuisine. . . . Now, in the wake of a career-ending catastrophe, she's ready for a change -- so she takes off for Beijing to stay with her older sister, Claire. . . . . In the midst of her extreme culture shock, and the more she comes to learn about her sister's own secrets, Isabelle can't help but wonder whether coming to China was a mistake -- or an extraordinary chance to find out who she really is." Sister's secrets? Discovering yourself? This could be an interesting, insightful book, but it could also be incredibly cheesy chick lit.

It's the latter.

It's pretty decent as chick lit goes, but chick lit nonetheless. It's predictable, a quick read, and best when it sticks to food and personal revelations rather than dating, broad assertions about the nature of cross-cultural experiences, and sibling rivalries. (I correctly guessed that the writer is an only child simply from the way she wrote about the main character and her sister. It was just too discombobulated a mess of rivalry, grudges, lack of communication, and yet also intuitively knowing what the other needed and thought.)

Ann Wah admirably figures out how to write bilingual dialogue, explaining important phrases but not bogging down comprehension with a dual system. I got a little annoyed that the pinyin had no tones, but that's not Wah's fault, and for most English readers I dare say it's less distracting to get romanizations of Chinese without little lines above each syllable.

Wah also shines when she talks about Chinese food, which actually made me hungry for Chinese street food more than once. And this may be the first book I've ever read that truthfully explains the awkwardness and avoidance that leads to really unacceptable ways of breaking up with someone. As in, I had total empathy for the text messager in the story, even though I still know it's a despicable thing to do.

However, the book felt too autobiographical -- too many details that didn't make sense to put it unless it was just an observation the author personally made and wanted to include. Yet at the same time, the book was too fake. Sometimes the dialogue was awkward because it tried to explain things without making a proper aside (like when the main character's best friend in China explains to her that she rides a bike to work -- gah!! main character would know that already, so it shouldn't be dialogue, but part of the narration). Or the narration sounded weird because it became too colloquial/talky, as when the main character explains that in middle school, "Shannon and I soon became BFFs." Really? "BFFs"?

But the stylistic awkwardness would be forgiven if it weren't for the totally lame love interest plot. I give Wah points for not even trying to pretend that she's come up with something suspenseful -- she makes it painfully obvious who the main character is going to end up with moment she meets him. It's just too too "meet cute" not to end with some ridiculous mushy dialogue at the back of the book. But it did annoy me that the reader is introduced to the romantic interest on page 68, I figured out who he was by page 69, and the main character doesn't figure it out until page 204. I mean, being a little dense is one thing, but if you know a guy named Charlie is going to be at an event that is honoring a guy named Charles who you know works in the SAME OFFICE, don't you think you might, just might, put 2 and 2 together? What works in crappy romantic comedy movies doesn't work quite as well in first person narratives because narrator has to both give all the necessary information and be stupid enough not to know what's going on.

But all in all, Kitchen Chinese was enjoyable enough, especially for its descriptions of China and Chinese food. It's not particularly thought provoking, but it's worth reading over a weekend or on the beach. As long as there's a Chinese restaurant nearby to fulfill your cravings.

Shades of Grey

Another Lenten season without movies. And so you, dear reader, are going to have to deal with book reviews instead of any movie reviews for the next 40 days. Unless, of course, I review a movie I watched before Ash Wednesday. Which I guess I could do. Hmmm... Well, until I do that:

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde


OK, I'm not an objective reader here -- Jasper Fforde is my favorite living author -- but this was a lot of fun to read. Not as brilliant as the first few Thursday Next novels, or even the first of the Nursery Crimes, but still I think this series has a ton of potential. It's a zany world of colorblind people, where social caste is based on how much and which color you can see. Also a mildew that is the cause of death for each and every person. Also an antiquated system of marrying for rank, not love. Also Apocryphal people, and highly regulated paint shops, and animals born with bar codes to identify themselves. Jasper Fforde is also one of the few people I can think of who could pull off writing such a funny, comedic book that ends, rather than with a happy couple and Good overcoming Evil, with a sham marriage and deaths of several important characters. And yet I still loved it.

I'm such a pushover for Fforde that I'll give this 4 out of 4 stars, even though I've read better from him, and there were some passages that were a bit stilted (this is by far his most complicated alternate reality yet -- explaining the rules to a colorblind society that can still produce artificial color that everyone can see gets a bit convoluted at times).

War Reporting for Cowards

Amazon is selling this book for $3.77 at the moment -- if you are thinking about buying it, now is the time!

It's hard to imagine less than two weeks of actual war reporting being stretched into a whole book, but Ayres does it quite well, and I only rarely begrudged him my $12 in exchange for a memoir so light on the experience actually, you know, billed in the title. I found myself laughing out loud on the Metro, which is always a good sign for a book.

What's more, I never felt like Ayres was dogmatic in any way. This isn't an anti-war book. It's an anti-Ayres-being-at-the-war book. And it's not a dry political/military history book -- he doesn't spend much time discussing the overall politics and war strategy of the Iraq war (is it too soon for that?)

Best of all, Ayres appears to have real respect for the others who seem so alien to him, especially the Marines with whom he lived for a short time. Ayres says in the acknowledgments, "My own experiences in Iraq are trivial compared with those of the Marines; but warriors are rarely writers (when they are, they win Pulitzers), and I hope that my memoir helps readers understand what these men's daily lives are like." That it did.

(As an added bonus, Ayres' account of his experiences in NYC on 9/11 and the days shortly thereafter exhibit an insight into the emotions of those weeks better than anything I've read in a long time. I found myself contemplating my own perspective of those anthrax-and-terrorist-filled days much more deeply than I have in the last 5-7 years. A beautifully heart-wrenching chapter.)

Books coming to life

I only wish I could embed this in the book I'm writing. Since I can't, I'll put it here.


via boingboing

Brilliant Frivolity

Sometimes silly, delightful little cream puffs of fiction are so silly and delightful as to be brilliant. For some reason, this genre has been my focus of the last week, starting with reading Something New (aka Something Fresh), the first Blandings Castle book by P.G. Wodehouse, the absolute master of all things silly and delightful.

Then I found Rings on her Fingers, which is quite like The Lady Eve -- Henry Fonda getting duped by a beautiful con artist who ends up falling in love with him. This got me thinking of Preston Sturges (as Lady Eve is one of his), so I rented Easy Living, an early Preston Sturges movie that somehow I had missed until now even though Jean Arthur stars. Perhaps in another mood I would not have thought it so wonderful, but I have decided I am quite fond of it. Screwball comedy is film's answer to P.G. Wodehouse and humorists of his ilk.

And now I am back to P.G. Wodehouse. Damn you Google Books and your full pdf texts of books out of copyright. I shall now go start reading A Damsel in Distress, forsaking much needed sleep.

I Read Books! Bartleby the Scrivener

This semester I'm taking a class called Law and Literature. Our first assignment was Billy Budd and Bartleby the Scrivener, both written by Herman Melville. Somehow I've never become a Melville fan, even though I love nautical stories and maritime history (and have read most of David Cordingly's books on the subject, which I highly recommend). Maybe it's the fact that the stories move so slowly, or that they are so allegorical as to become uninteresting to me. Anyway, here are the thoughts I wrote for our first assignment:

When I read these stories, I was home for vacation. My father asked me what “Bartleby the Scrivener” was about. “Well, it’s about a copy clerk in a law office who does nothing, but his boss feels awkward and doesn’t fire him, and then the clerk dies,” I replied.

Perhaps I was being too harsh in describing the story so simplistically, but I found the story quite dull and Bartleby unsympathetic. The narrator went out of his way to say that Bartleby was irreproachably honest and decent, but I was unconvinced. The narrator claimed to be irritated and repulsed by Bartleby because he was a lost soul and pity was no longer helpful, but I think my dislike of Bartleby came from a different source – what, though, was hard to determine.

Perhaps I am just not as curious about Bartleby as the Lawyer was. I did not wonder where Bartleby came from or what his story was – I just wondered what was the point. And a paragraph at the end did not serve to satisfy or even whet my appetite. So . . . Bartleby was a dead letter personified? He was dead inside? He was just extremely dissatisfied with his job? Perhaps I’m not smart enough to get it, but that still doesn’t make me care about a character so impassive and unchangeable.

The Lawyer attempted to be charitable towards his employee, and refused to fire him. Me, I felt no such charity: Bartleby didn’t seem infirm or so aged that he required compassion. Rather, he seemed to require a good shaking to get him to do something – anything! – for his own good. I felt like calling the police to remove him from the office might serve the same purpose as slapping someone who is being hysterical (Do people really do this? It make sense to me, but I’ve only seen it in the movies.).

Perhaps it is my youth that makes me so unfeeling towards copyist, while the Lawyer’s age gives him wisdom to see Bartleby as “the victim of innate and incurable disorder.” Or perhaps it is my all too American urge (encouraged by Harvard Law School) to value productivity above all else that gives me no pity for Bartleby, no inclination to cry out about the man and his symbolism for all humanity. The Lawyer himself is unambitious and has created “the cool tranquility of a snug retreat.” Even in my envy for that sort of life, I feel slight aversion to the Lawyer in his own complacency. How much further beyond aversion, then, do Bartleby and his inaction inspire? (And how much does it prove my point about American compulsion to productivity when Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word “unambitious?”)

My hope is that I would not be so unfeeling towards a real person – that I would feel some sort of compassion towards and interest in a real-life Bartleby. I hope that my disdain for Bartleby is for him as a character in a story. My movie-trained sensibilities were frustrated by a story that revolves around an immovable person. The other clerks were no exemplars of Puritan work ethic, but they interested and amused me because they did things. The Lawyer was unambitious, but I still respected him for his introspection and desire to do something, even if he decided on something so ridiculous as moving his offices in order to avoid his own clerk. Bartleby, on the other hand, was like a passive rock, and I felt that, like a rock, he didn’t warrant twenty pages of narration.

The Gun Seller

I don’t usually review books, but since I gave up television for Lent this year, I haven’t watched any DVDs recently. However, earlier this week I really needed a break from law school work, and so I read a novel. What a quaint idea, I know.

The book, The Gun Seller, was itself pretty quaint. The first novel by actor Hugh Laurie, it was pretty clearly influenced by the writing of P.G. Wodehouse (which is actually why I picked up the book in the first place). The book is filled with delightfully pointless sidenotes by the narrator, in the style of Bertie Wooster. For example:

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

There are a couple jokes that don’t quite translate to the American ear, the most prominent one being a misunderstanding about a character’s name -- Murdah, not Murder, which, instead of making me have to rethink the spelling of the character’s name, made me have to rethink the pronunciation of Murder. But for the most part Mr Laurie successfully creates a deft and amusing narrating voice, which I loved.

However, the book didn’t rest on just being quaint. Instead our verbally deft narrator is set in the middle of a complicated spy novel. Characters come and go, and their dialogue often doesn’t keep clear their relationships to each other. The book itself is split into two parts, with each part feeling like a completely separate story because the main ensemble cast completely changes, other than the narrator. And if you were confused the first time you watched Mission Impossible, the plot is going to run away from you more than a couple times. My attempt to summarize will hopelessly leave out important plot points, but here goes: Thomas Lang, the narrator, is asked to kill a rich American. He refuses and decides to warn the American, but in doing so accidentally gets involved in a multinational plot to sell weapons to rogue nations, specifically by creating terrorism in order to swat it down. (Think Gulf War newsreels as marketing campaigns.) Lang gets recruited to help destroy the conspiracy, then recruited to be part of it by infiltrating and setting up the terrorist group. And along the way, he falls in love a couple times. Even with first-person narration, it’s difficult to keep track of who is deceiving whom and for what purposes.

The book works best if you’re the sort of person who loves both the TV show Jeeves and Wooster and 24. If not, there will be parts of the novel that feel slow or pointless or confusing. But if you somehow feel you’ve always wanted to read an American spy thriller and a British class comedy at the same time, this may be the only book that can fulfill your need.