Review: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Title: Wolf Hall

Author: Hilary Mantel

Pages: 532

Source: From the library where I work

Challenges: Read 'n' Review challenge

First Sentence: "'So now get up.'"

Summary (From book jacket):
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power.
England is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and Catholic Europe oppose him. The king's quest for freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and creates a years-long power struggle between the Church and the Crown.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell, a wholly original man, both a charmer and a bully, an idealist and an opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: Cromwell is a consummate politician, hardened by years abroad and his personal losses. Implacable in his ambition and self-taught -- it is said that he can recite the entire New Testament from memory, knows Europe's major languages, and speaks poetry freely -- Cromwell soon becomes the country's most powerful figure after Henry. When Henry pursues his desire to marry Anne Boleyn, it is Cromwell who breaks the deadlock and allows the king his heart's desire. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition -- Thomas More, "the man for all seasons"; Katherine the queen; his daughter the princess Mary -- but what will be the price of his triumph?

My Two Cents:

If you follow my Twitter or Goodreads updates at all, or if you've seen my last couple weeks' worth of It's Monday! What Are You Reading? and Teaser Tuesdays, you'll know my fight to read this book. I'm not usually afraid of chunksters, and I love anything to do with England, so this book seemed perfect for me.

The first twenty pages or so were great. I was going gangbusters getting into the world of Thomas Cromwell. Then, it all came to a screeching halt. I'm not sure what happened, because Mantel is such a great writer -- her prose is solid and tight, her descriptions are evocative, her syntax is varied -- but I just couldn't make any progress. It started to feel like a chore. But, I persisted, promising myself at least 50 pages every day (Which was amended to 50 pages every two days), and finally finished.

I really did enjoy this novel and, looking back, I'm so glad I persisted through my struggles and finished the book. Mantel did an amazing job painting Tudor England for me. Her characters were great. I actually really liked Thomas Cromwell. He was funny and caring, especially in regards to his family, but also reeked of ambition, which is what made him so successful at Henry's court. Mantel did a fabulous job making him a very well-rounded character.

I wanted to slap Thomas More upside the head until near the end of the book. He was mean and petty and a horrid misogynist, and he was far too pious for my tastes. Part of what I liked so much about this book was Mantel's ability to turn someone whom history has taught us is a good figure (At least someone who went through primary and secondary Catholic schooling) in More and turn him into a character that we are almost glad to be rid of.

Anne Boleyn was another character that I just couldn't get enough of. She was sassy and tough and out for her own causes. She wasn't about to let anyone or anything stand in her way. I usually don't like these types of characters in books -- the schemers only after power and fame -- but I really liked Anne. It's a big kudos to Mantel's talent.

That all being said, though, I can say this is one book, although I really liked it, I am not eager to revisit. I won't say that I'll never read it again, but it will be a long, long time before I do.

My rating: 9/10

Review: Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Title: Rabbit at Rest

Author: John Updike

Pages: 465

Challenges: Read 'n' Review challenge

First sentence: "Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his own: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane."

Summary:
OK, I decided that I need to make up my own summary, because the ones I've found give too much away. Don't you hate that?

The final in the Rabbit Angstrom series (Although there's a novella that follows the timeline of this, according to Amazon), Rabbit at Rest finds Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom at 55-years-old, semi-retired and suffering from a bad heart. The book is set in 1988-1989, nearly 30 years from the setting of the first novel in the series.

He and his wife, Janice, now spend half their year at a condominium in Florida, and the other half back home in Pennsylvania. The novel opens with the couple waiting for a post-Christmas visit from their son, Nelson, and his family. Nelson becomes increasingly antagonistic and "twitchy" throughout the trip, often disappearing for long periods of time with Harry and Janice's car.

Following a heart attack in Florida, Harry and Janice return to Pennsylvania, where Harry has an angioplasty. Although he knows he should exercise more and eat less, Harry can't get past the desire to snack constantly, mostly on things that are terrible for him.

The couple finds out Nelson is addicted to cocaine and has swindled the family Toyota dealership out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harry tries to convince Janice to pull Nelson from the job, a job Harry never wanted him to have because he doesn't think Nelson is responsible enough, but it isn't until Nelson admits his problem and enters rehabilitation that anything gets done.

I really don't want to go into much more in this summary, as it kind of helps give away the ending. So, if you're still interested, read the book!

My Two Cents:
This was my favorite of the whole quartet, at least from what I can remember of Rabbit, Run. Nelson is still as annoying as he was in Rabbit is Rich (My review here) , but Harry is much less horrible than he was in Rabbit Redux (My review here). In fact, he seemed to mellow out a whole lot more and actually start to stand up for what he thought should happen instead of sitting back and taking it all.

Janice started to redeem herself in my mind in this book, but kind of threw it all away in the latter part of the book. I didn't like her in Redux because she put herself before the welfare of her son, and she was just really, really dumb in Rich. She was still far too indulgent of Nelson and his immaturity, but she actually stood up to him, which he needed.

As always, Updike was one of the masters of prose writing. Some of these passages are amazingly brilliant and detailed. Here's an example:

Up, up; the air thins, the barometer registers, the timer begins to tick as the plane snugly bores through the darkness and the pilot chats on the radio while the cockpit lights burn and wink around him and the passengers nod over their drinks in their slots of pastel plastic. This image, like a seed at last breaking its shell in moist soil, awakens in Harry the realization that even now as he lies here in this antiseptic white fog tangled in tubes and ties of blood and marriage he is just like the people he felt so sorry for, falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death. The fate awaiting him behind this veil of medical attention is as absolute as that which greeted those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like garbage bags full of water.

I'm still failing to see where this quartet is a "valentine to (Updike's) country" as Joyce Carol Oates said, but I think this is a book, if only for the prose alone, belongs in the American canon of great books.

My rating: 8/10

Review: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Title: The House of Mirth
Author: Edith Wharton
Pages: 320
Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge


Amazon.com Product Description:

The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits - her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market for too long. Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing, along the way, a wider picture of a society in transition, a rapidly changing New York where the old certainties of manners, morals and family have disappeared and the individual has become an expendable commodity.


My Two Cents:

Although I love Classics and read them more often then contemporary fiction, I'm not usually one for American fiction. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps it's just the latent Anglophile in me, but I've never much liked many American authors (Although I have found favorite authors in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and, now, Edith Wharton), so I always approach an American Classic with a bit of trepidation.


This book, however, drew me in right away.

I instantly liked Lily Bart, even when she seemed a bit shallow and dense. She's like America's version of Mrs. Dalloway -- A woman you don't think much about in passing because you think you know her just by looking at her, but there's something much more complex lurking beneath the surface.

Lily is one of those rare women in the late 19th century -- unmarried and in her late 20s. She begins the book planning to marry the puritanical Percy Gryce, a wealthy man with a large collection of Americana books handed down to him by his uncle -- but her penchant for gambling at bridge scares him off. In an attempt to earn more money (Lily's parents are both dead and neither was ever rich, but they taught her to live as if she was rich), Lily becomes embroiled with a "friend" who ultimately causes her downfall.

Wharton's writing just jumps off the page. I was able to see Lily and the others at every step of the way, right down to the last stitch of clothing. She also has the ability to make you feel sorry for Lily while, at the exact same time, mildly condemning her for her actions.

I'm not going to give away the ending here, but I will say that, even as surprising as it may seem, you will realize it was there, hiding beneath all the baubles and bridge games all along.

My rating: 9/10

Review: The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

Title: The Year of Fog
Author: Michelle Richmond
Pages: 369
Challenges: Take Another Chance Challenge ("Read Your Doppelganger"); Read 'n' Review Challenge





From Publishers Weekly:

In this spare page-turner, Richmond (Dream of the Blue Room) draws complex tensions from a the set setup of a child gone missing. Photographer Abby Mason stops on San Francisco's Ocean Beach with her fiancé Jake's six-year-old daughter, Emma, to photograph a seal pup; by the time Abby looks up, Emma has disappeared. Abby, who narrates, flashes back to her growing relationship with high school teacherJake, and sketches its transformation over the course of the search. Emma's mother, Lisbeth (who abandoned the family three years earlier), wants back into Jake's life—even as he is giving up hope on finding Emma. Abby delves into the bereft missing children subculture and into the vagaries of memory. A hypnotist helps Abby unearth promising details of that singular last day with Emma, but the information requires major follow-through from Abby. The book's twist on missing child stories is wholly effective. Richmond develops the principle characters, and Abby's dysfunctional parents make for sharply drawn secondaries, as do local surfers. The book is beautifully paced—one feels Abby's clarity of purpose from the first page. The sure-handed denouement reflects the focus and restraint that Richmond brings to bear throughout.

My two cents:

I chose this book because its author, Michelle Richmond, shares my first name. And, it looked interesting.

I had no idea I was in for one of the most intense reads I've experienced in a long time. It wasn't intense in the thriller kind of way, or the challenging-to-read kind of way, but intense in the, "I-can't-imagine-this-happening-to-me-OMG-I-have-to-find-out-what-happens" kind of way.

The book begins with 6-year-old Emma's disappearance and follows Abby, Emma's father's fiance, through the next year and her search for Emma. It captured me from the first page. Perhaps it's the fact that missing children capture the public's attention on a fairly regular basis, as the situation is a parent's worst nightmare. Perhaps it's Richmond's writing style. Either way, I didn't want to put this book down.

I agonized along with Abby through her long hours of searching and wandering the streets of San Francisco on the ever-dimming hopes that she would find Emma waiting there. I thrilled as she found the possibility of a new lead in the case. I watched as she tried, desperately, to remember every small detail of that foggy morning on the beach.

The sign of a good book, to me, lies in the characters. Do you care about them? Does it matter what happens to them? If you don't, that's usually the sign of a bad book (Although there are a few exceptions). This novel has characters I cared about in spades.

Abby, of course, was the character about whom I cared the most, as she is the narrator. I cared what happened to Emma and Jake, too, as they were directly related to the disappearance. But there were also several peripheral characters of whom I grew fond, and, if you read this book, you'll meet them, too.

This book, obviously, has a lot to do with memory. Abby reads constantly about the attainment of memories and those who have tried to recall past memories. She not only deals with her memories of Emma's disappearance, but also many memories of her life before meeting Emma and her father, Jake.

Richmond has a talent for details and a clear writing style that helps this novel flow along. Sometimes, I would pick it up and in no time flat, realize I had read another 50 pages. That's a sign of an engrossing novel, in my book. And, it's not a difficult read, by any stretch of the imagination.

I would recommend this book with no reservations, although you may find yourself being much more wary out in public with children after reading it.

My rating: 8/10

I've Beaten the BBC!

I found this meme on Kerri's site and just had to brag... I mean, try it. :)

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your blog. Look at the list and put an (X) after those you have read. Pass it along to other book lovers...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X) -- Does writing a thesis on this get me extra points??
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -- I've read 2 of the 3... Doesn't count for a whole one!
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 6

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (X)
Total: 7

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X) -- Only about a dozen times!
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (X)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (X) -- Ahh, how I miss Oxford!
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- Never finished it in HS
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -- Never finished this one in HS, either
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Total: 4

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X) -- Uh, this is part of the Chronicles...
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Total: 4

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (X)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total: 5

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Total: 3

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Total: 0

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
Total: 3

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Total: 3

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 4

GRAND TOTAL: 39

My Favorite Books of 2009

For some reason, I didn't keep a list of all the books I have read this year. I'm not quite sure why, I just didn't.

So, I'm going to be dredging up 10 of the best books I read this year, inspired by Jenners' post on Find Your Next Book Here. Several were published this year, but some weren't. I'm also going to give you a little bit of my opinion on each because, well, this is my blog and I can do that.

In no particular order, here are my 10 favorite books of 2009:

1. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery



Even though I said I wasn't going to rank them, this book is at the absolute top of the list of books I have read in at least the last five years. It is that good. Funny, poignant and very, very smart, this is one book no one should miss.

2. Blindness by Jose Saramago


This book made me think a lot about the human condition and the brutality of men (In the way that Lord of the Flies makes you think). I watched the film shortly after reading the book and, although I thought the movie was fairly faithful in its rendering, I liked the book better. This was one I couldn't put down.

3. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton



I absolutely adored Morton's debut novel, The House at Riverton, so when this one came out, I had to read it. The thing I love about Kate Morton is that she gets you thinking you've solved the mystery, but she throws in enough red herrings along the way to make you re-evaluate your analysis every so often.

4. Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos



The concept of this book sounded interesting, so I picked it up. Although it seemed a little hard to fight through near the middle, the payoff is well worth the wait. This is realistic fantasy at its finest.

5. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory



I adore Philippa Gregory's historical fiction, and I was glad to see her begin to tackle the Plantagenets in another series. This is one of those books in which so much happens, you don't think anymore could possibly happen, but then you notice you're only halfway through the book.

6. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman




This is one of those books that I recommend to every kid that walks through the door of the library. It is imaginative (But when are Gaiman's books not imaginative?) and poignant, and they exist on a level that not only speaks to kids without talking down to them, but also to adults without boring them.

7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy



No one's list of great novels is complete without this monster. I loved how Tolstoy rendered not only the decadence of the upper classes realistically, but also that of the lower classes. If you'd like to read more about my debate over which character I actually liked, click here.

8. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie


This book took me the longest to read of any this year, partially because of personal circumstances, but also because Rushdie can be really difficult to read at times. This book is audacious, though (If it weren't Rushdie wouldn't have spent a decade hiding because there was a fatwa out against him), and it presents a very interesting view of religion.


9. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth


Roth gives a very interesting re-imagining of the 1940s in which FDR is defeated in the 1940 election by Charles Lindbergh. What results is a much less violent anti-Semitism than was seen in Nazi territory, but something very disturbing nonetheless.


10. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I couldn't believe it had taken me 24 years to finally read this book. It is so beautiful I was in tears most of the time. This is one that definitely transcends the boundaries of juvenile literature to present something that can speak to adults.





UPDATE:

I seem to have forgotten two books that I read this year which should be on this list!

11. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This book won the Pulitzer for a reason. It's hard to tell if you like Olive or hate Olive, but she is definitely one of the most interesting, well-rounded, vital characters I've met in a long time.

12. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

At first, I didn't want to read this book because it was all over blogs and lists of "recommended book club reading," which is kind of like Oprah's Book Club and the NYT Bestseller list in terms of turning me off. But, I'm glad I did. In a fairly simple epistolary novel, the authors show the power of reading and books in the lives of an island ravaged by war.

PS -- Thanks to martine frampton for mentioning both these books on her blog. You made me realize I had left out some great books!


Some runners-up:

1. Maximum Ride series by James Patterson
2. House of Night series by P.C. and Kristin Cast
3. Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead
4. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
5. The Man Who Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke
6. The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman
7. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
8. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
9. Open House, Home Safe and Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
10. Super-Toys Last All Summer Long: And Other Stories of Future Time by Brian Aldiss