27. The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Vintage UK (Random House), 519 pages, 2004

I hate to say this, because so many of my friends saw me reading this book and told me they LOVED it, were moved to tears by it, etc, but it was just too damn long. For a story with such an interesting premise it sure managed to be boring. The beginning, when we're still putting together the story of Henry's time-travel, was great, but then it devolved into hundreds of pages of wedded suburban humdrum. Now they're shopping for a house! Now Clare wants a baby! Now they're struggling with infertility! If I found this kind of shit interesting I could just re-friend all the people I hated in high school and read my facebook feed. Something about the characters rubbed me the wrong way too--the princess and the bad boy. I didn't think they really showed any chemistry--the only reason they were together was because, well, they were (thanks to Henry time-traveling to meet Clare in her childhood so that neither of them had any choice; it's FATE!!!1). The last time I read a love story this contrived was, no joke, Twilight.

Next up: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

26. LIAR

LIAR, Justine Larbalestier
Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers e-book, 280 pages, 2009

I first heard about this book because of the cover controversy, which you can Google if you like, but it's far from the most interesting thing about the book, so I won't be talking about it here. I expected LIAR to be fast-paced, tightly constructed, surprising, and smart, and it exceeded my expectations by being all those things and also literary. It's the kind of book that's hard to talk about in a review without giving away massive spoilers, but at its most basic it's a murder mystery told by a self-avowed liar. The question throughout the novel is how much of Micah's fantastic story you can believe, and of course I have my own theory, but I won't be sharing it, partly because it contains too many spoilers and partly because there are so many possible interpretations and each reader has to draw their own conclusions.

(please someone else read this book so we can talk about it)

Anyway, what really pushed this from "good read" to "WOW" for me was the subtle but penetrating commentary on femininity that was everywhere in the story. Micah spins the most elaborate lies to alternately hide, explain, deny and justify her sexuality; the author never beats you over the head with it (although one of the characters makes the mistake of pointing it out to Micah), but it makes the book so much more than it would be if it was just a murder mystery.

25. Small Gods

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
HarperCollins e-book, 343 pages, 1992

This was my first Terry Pratchett novel. I really wanted to love it, and it did grow on me as I went along, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. For one thing, most of the book is a parody of religion, which I can appreciate on an abstract level but have trouble really getting into because the particular kind of straight-laced, by-the-book religion that he parodies is just so far removed from my life. I didn't find it laugh-out-loud funny, either, and it took about two-thirds of the book for me to start getting really invested in the plot. I do plan to give Pratchett's Discworld another try at some point--I've had Hogfather and Going Postal recommended to me, and I think I have both of them lying around my apartment somewhere.

In other news, I've now read 25 books, which means I'm halfway through the 50-book challenge! Yes, I was supposed to have reached this milestone by July 1. I have a lot of books I'm excited to read, though, so hopefully I'll catch up. Best books so far: Revolutionary Road, A Wild Sheep Chase, The Hunger Games, The Left Hand of Darkness and East of Eden. I cannot say enough good things about these books!

24. Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Pantheon Books (Random House), 138 pages, 1955 (with afterword written in 1975)

This was a quick read and a decent one, although I enjoyed the chapters about art and solitude more than the ones about relationships. I used to read a lot of stuff like this and then I started getting old and moving to other countries and getting my heart broken and realized I could learn all this stuff about tranquility and peace and self-sufficiency better that way. Still, this was well-written and insightful. I had it recommended to me as a good book to take on a solitary retreat and that's exactly the way I would recommend it to someone else, I think.

Things that make me glad I live in Japan

500-yen ramen in flavors like tomato, curry, lemon shio and kimchi. Onsen. Words like "虫めがね" (magnifying glass, literally "bug glasses") and "爆発" (explosion). Tiny green frogs. Shiba inu. 100-yen stores. Bento boxes. Cell phone straps. Stumbling upon stone gods in hidden shrines. My students' faces. Yoneyama. Freshly planted rice fields reflecting the snow-covered mountains like mirrors. Ginkgo trees in the fall. Kotatsu. Nabe. Vending machines. Unsweetened iced green and jasmine tea. The ladies in my English conversation group. The moment of silence right after finishing a taiko song. Salmon onigiri, bibimbap onigiri, and yaki onigiri. The coast between Naoetsu and Nadachi. Tea ceremony. Trees right out of a Miyazaki film. Morning glories. Hydrangeas in colors I never even imagined. Crepe paper flowers on posters at school. The goofy pictures on city and ward signs. Sports day. Chorus festival. Military-style school uniforms. My apartment. Cheap tofu. The gnarled black branches of persimmon trees blooming with startling orange fruit. Pineapple chu-hi. Summer storms.

A summer morning in Japan

7:12 AM: Save tiny green frog from certain death on the spokes of your bike wheel. Bike 4 miles past rice fields to train station.

8:21 AM: Listen to earworm-y ring tone from a ten-year-old kid's keitai on the train. Spend the next 5 minutes trying to figure out what videogame it's from before realizing it's Gershwin.

8:35 AM: Stand in line at train station conbini and wonder whether "THE OOLONG-CHA" is a misuse of the definite article or a redundant, accentless use of the French "thé."

8:52 AM: Work Blog posts.

23. The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Scholastic ePub edition, 275 pages, 2008


I know you have heard this from everyone and their mom by now but oh my God this was so good. SO GOOD. In case you live under a rock, it's a dystopian YA novel in which one boy and one girl from each of the 12 districts of Panem are selected as "tributes" and forced to participate in a televised battle to the death. This summary was, I'll admit, unappealing to me, but I read it anyway because of the buzz and I am completely won over. The suspense! The action! The romance! Agjsdlkgsfd! It stays far away from any kind of preachiness or political agenda, which I think was a smart move; instead it explores the choices and the sacrifices made by the tributes forced to participate in the brutal Games, all wrapped up in the most exciting adventure I've read since... I don't know, Harry Potter, maybe, but The Hunger Games sucked me in even more than that. I'm dyyyyying to read the next one but I don't want the series to end so I'm forcing myself to space it out. 


Next up: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

22. East of Eden

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Penguin Classics, 602 pages, 1952


Like most Americans my age, I read my fair share of Steinbeck in school--Of Mice and Men in the 9th grade (which was a total waste of time with the teacher I had) and The Grapes of Wrath in the 11th--but I must have been too young to appreciate it because I don't remember either of those novels being anywhere close to this stunning. Giants like this are hard for me to write blog posts about because I don't feel like I can say anything about a book so great and ambitious, but I can say that it made me so, so homesick for California, and proud to be from a state with such a rich and varied heritage, not to mention its literary tradition (Steinbeck! Henry Miller! The Beats! Just about every Asian American author I can think of!). Steinbeck is a master of the grand and the epic, and I think East of Eden also shows how well he knew and loved California and its history--the towns that sprang up out of nowhere overnight, the whorehouses, the character of its inhabitants. I loved Lee as a character--his insistence on being a servant for the Trask family despite other opportunities makes him less than ideal as a token minority, but what the hell, Steinbeck understood Asian Americans and their place in California history better than most white authors today. As he puts it: "Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." It is probably a sign that I've been in Japan too long that that is getting me all choked up with patriotic fervor, that or I'm getting sentimental in my old age. 


Next up: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

21. Sex and the City

Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell
Grove/Atlantic Kindle Edition, 240 pages, 1996


This probably would have jived (what is the past participle of jive anyway? Jove?) better with my frame of mind if I had picked it up during my failed attempt at dating in Japan and not right after embarking upon a new, sickeningly lovey-dovey relationship, but either way, it fucking sucked. The unrelenting cynicism was part of it, but it was really just ridiculous navel-gazing. I don't know anyone like the characters in this book and I doubt you do either. In fact, I had a really hard time keeping names straight because they were all just cardboard cutouts and none of them ever did anything interesting. For the most part I was reading the book as a completely separate entity from the TV show (which is loosely--key word loosely--based on it--some of the characters share names, it's set in New York; that's about it), but I was surprised to find that the Carrie in the book is self-destructive and, well, kind of a bitch. I think this whole mess might have actually worked with a likable heroine, but as it is I had to read it in tiny bits and pieces to even be able to stand it. 


Next up: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

20. Tales of the City

Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
HarperPerennial ePub edition, 358 pages, 1978


Dang I need to catch up. I especially want to post more about Japan, but I have 4 book posts to get through too!


After reading this whole book I still can't decide if I liked it or not. It was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, and it is traaaash. It's very dated, I didn't like any of the characters, and it does this thing I hate where it pretends no one is born in San Francisco and everyone moved there to escape a stifling Midwestern upbringing. (Get out of my city, yo.) But it has its moments--the conversation between Anna Madrigal and Edgar Halcyon about how San Franciscans are reincarnations of the people of Atlantis got me right in the chest. And I still kind of love it in the way I love any book (movie, article) that lets me walk the streets of my beloved city and pass all the landmarks in my memory, not the touristy stuff that everyone knows but Mt. Davidson, Seal Rocks, Colma, the Marina Safeway.


This was also the first ebook I read on my new Kindle (more on that later), and while I absolutely love Kindle reading, my caveat for this particular ebook is that the text quality is HORRIBLE. Stray words at the end of paragraphs (widows and orphans for those knowledgeable about typesetting), weird spacing, question marks sprinkled throughout the text in place of various symbols, and at least one or two typos per chapter (and the chapters are like a page long). We're talking really bad typos here. The worst one was at the beginning of a chapter--a character's name, Beauchamp, was supposed to be the first word of the chapter but instead they wrote "eauchamp." With the lowercase "e" as a drop cap. I know I'm a copy editor but this goes beyond the kind of nitpicking I normally do; I think it would be distracting to the average person. I am actually embarrassed for the people who put this ebook together and I would not pay money for it again.


Next up: Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell