American Wife

I read American Wife for two reasons: Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a book I happened upon called Prep that I was surprised to find myself liking, and the Inauguration was about to happen. I also wanted something with some emotional and acute observational depth, both things Prep had an inordinate degree of, and I wanted something that read easily.

American Wife is about Laura Bush, but not really. It's more of an autobiography of someone I doubt Sittenfeld has ever met, accompanied with a vast artistic license. While most things in this semi-fictional retelling of the Bushes lives actually happened, Sittenfeld twists things subtly enough to make them feel fresh and real. American Wife has a lot of good things going on for it, but it seems massively uneven, and quite frequently lacks a center of gravity to keep it from becoming more than a spruced-up rehash of a story we're already mostly familiar with.

While her other book Prep has an incredibly likable, three-dimensional protagonist, Sittenfeld possesses a weakness for surrounding her central characters with very flimsy secondary characters. In American Wife, the stand-in for Laura Bush, Lindy Blackwell, doesn't have the element of realness and likability to hold the some five-hundred pages together, especially when her character is merely buffered with are lazy stereotypes of George Bush and his cronies. It's also very hard to like a character, no matter how well written, who is willfully and happily married for many years to a very unlikable buffoon.

Ultimately, I did enjoy this book, partly due to its gimmick occasionally working and giving true insight into the fallibility of a presidential couple. Also, Sittenfeld is quite often a very masterful writer, communicating ideas and emotions very accurately and very bluntly. She always seems to choose the right words and have very economical sentences and structure. It is unfortunate that, despite her talents, the overall narrative lacks the same depth and nuance of one of the worst presidencies ever to befall our nation.

I would recommend this book at the moment because it really does make you think about how love and politics can be such a separate thing, and with a new President and First Lady entering the office, it definitely sheds some light on the reality of the function of a presidential wife. Although I am still grasping for whether or not it answers some fundamental questions about how those love and politics co-exist, the book definitely poses some interesting questions and keeps you thinking about how people can end up in any situation so quickly and unexpectedly.

Welcome to my book blog

So I'm starting a book blog. This is part New Years resolution, part desire to write about books I've read, and part challenge to myself to push myself to read more books and less internet junk. In this blog I will:

-most likely write in complete sentences
-tone down the "snark-factor" a few notches
-write thoughtful but probably brief reviews of books I have read
-attempt to sound smarter than I have in the past few months

Here's the first two books I've read in 2009:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

This is the new book by the same guy who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point. It's basically a study of what social, ancestral, and cultural elements cultivate successful people. I've always loved Gladwell's very layperson-y way of talking about complex sociological issues in an endearingly narrative fashion. In other words, he lets real life stories pave the way for his theory, as well as dictate the overall rhythm of his book.

He gives good examples of how luck and circumstances have so much to do with why some people are so extraordinarily successful, while also outlining how those who have obvious innate talent can miss opportunity. It's pretty fascinating thinking that if Bill Gates hadn't had a large sequence of events occur in his life, he probably would have ended up a very different person.

I would definitely recommend this book if you want to let your brain do some big thinkin'. I'm totally into it because I was a Sociology major, but it's so engaging and well-told that anyone can get into it without to many thought hurdles.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

I recently picked this up because I had read the State by State book, which takes the 50 states and has an author, usually from the region or at least associated with it, write about it. It was based on the WPA project started by the FDR administration, wherein many of the great writers of that era struck out into the country to document each of the states.

Travels With Charley is like a companion to these books, in the sense that Steinbeck does a tour around the US with his dog, Charley, and tries to find a unifying theory for what makes us American. While that sounds a bit cheesy, Steinbeck injects a pretty good narrative thread and pace throughout the book, detailing events and areas that stood out the most to him.

I really liked it because 1) it inspired a sense of freedom and wanderlust in me and 2) Steinbeck is a pretty keenly observant person and seems to note a lot of stuff that is still prevalent in American culture, without being too overtly judgmental or nostalgic about it.

Good read for when you get tired of being rooted in one place and want to have someone take you on a whirlwind tour.