Jennie’s Reading List for November and December
Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich
I’m slowly getting caught up on this series – probably three times a year, I finish one book and want my next one to be something really easy and mindless. That’s when I turn to the Stephanie Plum series. They are the opposite of taxing, and every book is pretty much like the last one. I know that all sounds like an indictment, but as I said, a few times a year that’s exactly what I want. This entry was notable, at least, for having some Stephanie/Ranger action, which was welcome since with one exception (I think) their relationship is all just teasing/foreplay and I get tired of that. (To the degree that I have a team, which isn’t a very high degree at this point, I’m Team Ranger.) I could summarize the plot here but if you’ve read one you’ve read them all: Stephanie’s cars get blown up, her grandmother acts inappropriately at a funeral, Lula is sassy, people want to kill Stephanie, she’s a terrible bounty hunter, yada yada yada. I guessed the identity of Stephanie’s creepy stalker early on, but that didn’t so much disappoint me as make me feel clever for figuring it out (probably I shouldn’t have; it was pretty easy to figure out). I’d give this one a B. I’m sure I’ll be returning for the eighteenth book in a couple of months.
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Everything I Left Unsaid by M O’Keefe
I picked this up at Janine’s, and seemingly everyone else’s, glowing recommendation. It didn’t work for me as well as it did other readers. There were definitely aspects I liked – Annie was an intriguing heroine who was worth rooting for, and the writing was good. But I had a huge problem with Annie getting involved with Dylan given the fact that she was on the run from an abusive man. It just didn’t make sense to me – she was so wary and careful (with good reason) but still she’s having almost immediate phone sex with a total stranger? I ended up feeling annoyed with her because it seemed to show extraordinarily poor judgment (even more so when she knows more about Dylan and realizes that he’s got a record). I ended up feeling like Everything I Left Unsaid tried to break away from romance cliches but was inexorably drawn back to them; the theme of the good girl reforming the bad boy was strong in this one. Still, I liked it enough (or at least found it compelling enough) to start the sequel right after finishing it, and I gave it a B.
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The Truth About Him by M O’Keefe
This was a continuation of the story from Dylan’s POV (well, both books are from both characters’ POV, but Everything I Left Unsaid is Annie-first person and Dylan-third person, and The Truth About Him is the opposite). Janine reviewed The Truth About Him here. I honestly think the two books can be read as one longer story since the plot of the second is just a continuation of the first (though the second has more action, external conflict and violence). Dylan is a much less interesting character to me than Annie. It kind of annoyed me to have such a collection-of-romance-cliches hero paired with an unconventional heroine who I thought deserved better. Dylan checks off most of the standard romance hero boxes: brooding, terrible childhood, feels unworthy of the heroine’s love, improbably rich, improbably attractive to women in spite of being supposedly horribly scarred (I felt like the issue of his physical scars was built up in the first book and then ignored in the second). I liked some of the secondary characters a lot better than I did Dylan: Joan, Ben, and the morally ambiguous Tiffany (whom I’m guessing will be paired with Blake in a future book, though I hope I’m wrong; I LOATHED Blake). I ended up giving this one a B too, because it was readable and still somewhat different for all the cliches it hit, and because it had a number of characters I genuinely liked and found interesting.
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And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
I lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. I was young, definitely; 13 years old in 1982 when the disease was first given the name AIDS and stories began to appear in the local media with increasing frequency. But San Francisco was the epicenter of the disease and I was from an unusually liberal and politically aware family. My mom had many gay friends (her best friend died of AIDS in 1992) and hanging out in the Castro and going to the Gay Freedom Day Parade were staples of my upbringing. This is all to say that this book interested me in a very personal way as a chronicle (some would say the preeminent chronicle) of the beginning of the AIDS era. Actually, I’m not sure why I didn’t read this before, but I’m glad I got around to it; I ended up learning a lot about the period and the development of the AIDS story that I missed at the time.
The book interweaves three separate storylines: the personal, the political and the medical. The personal was understandably the most moving; the stories of the people who lived with and died of AIDS. The political was predictably infuriating (looking at some of the Amazon reviews, it seems like some people STILL want to argue the fight over closing the bathhouses). The medical story was the one that surprised me somewhat. Not just the actual clinical details (which I did sometimes find hard to follow, but which were well explained). What I wasn’t aware of at the time was all the posturing and jockeying for glory amongst some of the most prominent AIDS researchers, and in retrospect I found this infuriating, as well. People were dying and some researchers wouldn’t cooperate with others because they feared losing the credit for making important discoveries about the disease. Overall, And the Band Played On marks an incredible achievement; a sprawling yet personal record of one of the most important stories of the 20th century. I gave it an A.
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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The only thing I’d previously read by Wharton was Ethan Frome, which has always struck me as being un-Wharton-like in subject, at least from what I know of her work. Though Ethan Frome was pretty grim, I wanted to try her again, and picked The House of Mirth. The story begins with poor doomed Lily Bart on the edges of 1890s New York society; her once-wealthy family was financially ruined when she was a teenager, a calamity that hastened first her father’s death and then her mother’s. Raised to be a beautiful ornament to a wealthy man, Lily is consistently undone by her inability to settle, the small mistakes she makes out of naivete or weakness, and most of all by the fickleness and viciousness of the society she inhabits. It’s a sad story, but it’s so beautifully told that I gave it an A.
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I’ve been reading the Stephanie Plum books as they came out since they were in the low single digits. They are perfectly mindless and pleasant and sometimes that’s exactly what I want. I really enjoy this series on audiobook.
House of Mirth is one of my favorite books, and the movie adaptation with Gillian Anderson as Lily is very true to the novel and equally as gutting (to me). Glad that you loved it. For a more lighthearted Wharton (yes, it exists!) I always recommend her 1920s romp Glimpses of the Moon.
Edith Wharton is a gem, as an author and as a person. Try Age of Innocence next, which was also made into a great film with Daniel Day Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Edith lived in the society she wrote about and yet was able to look at it with the eyes of an impartial observer, a rare talent. Her characters are trapped in the society because they cannot bring themselves to break the silken bonds that hold them in place.
Lily Bart is a tragic figure, unable to sell herself to the highest bidder and yet unable to live without a man to support her. So sad.
I’ve started listening to the Plum books in audio, which seems to satisfy my compulsive need to know what is and isn’t happening with all the characters without enraging me at how thin the stories have become. Some of the recent ones have felt “off” in the voice, but this one seemed better to me. Since I never expect the relationship triangle to resolve, I don’t have a lot of expectations, which I think helps, too.
That’s two recs for Stephanie Plum on audio books – I may have to give them a try (I’m not really an audio book person). I agree with Robin that having low expectations going in helps my enjoyment.
@Tanya: I will look Glimpses of the Moon up! She is such a marvelous writer but I wouldn’t mind something less downbeat.
@Kilian Metcalf: I saw The Age of Innocence years ago in the theater – it was lovely (and quite a departure for Martin Scorsese!).
So I’ve only read two things by Wharton, Ethan Frome and the short story Roman Fever. Both are highly regarded by literary critics, but both were emphatically not my cuppa. So much so that I just think she’s not my cuppa.
I listened to the And The Band Played On on audio last year and it was excellent. I alternately cried, raged, marveled and cried again throughout the story. Just brilliant.
Did you know the author subsequently died of the disease Jennie? He deliberately chose not to find out his HIV status when he was writing the book as he didn’t want that knowledge, one way or the other, to influence his writing.
I started to wonder several books ago if Evanovich was using a ghost writer–the voice was definitely off in several installments–and have been afraid to return to them.
@Janine: I don’t remember that well how I felt about Ethan Frome, beyond finding it grim. I don’t know that I noticed Wharton’s beautiful, incisive prose the way I did with House of Mirth.
@Kaetrin: I knew he died of AIDS, but I didn’t know that he didn’t find out about his status until after he finished it. I marveled at Shilts’ ability to write such a comprehensive history of a time period so recently past – it seems like a massive undertaking and usually it takes years to achieve such a clear-eyed view of such momentous, tumultuous times.
@Donna Thorland: I haven’t really noticed a difference in the voice, but there have been longish gaps in my reading of the series, so I might be less likely to notice such things.
@Jennie: Yes, it is extraordinary. It seemed to me to be unbiased, comprehensive and authentic – though it’s possible I’m wrong on that. I knew about the HIV epidemic, of course. I was a teenager in the early/mid1980s and it was in the news but I really had no idea about its history. I felt it was an important book for me to read and understand. That it was a part of history but in my lifetime and I ought not be ignorant about it. It was hard to listen to so many personal, sad, frustrating and infuriating stories but I’m very glad I did.
I read And The Band Played On when it first came out. Author Randy Shilts news reporting of the AIDS epidemic and his book played a big role in getting government to take notice and do something about the AIDS crisis.
@Jennie and @Donna Thorland: The copyright to the books is “Evanovich, Inc.,” and I know her daughter has long been involved in the JE brand. Still, JE has always presented herself as a workhorse of a writer, so who knows. But I definitely feel that at some point after book ten the voice changed, and it hasn’t always felt consistent from book to book. However, because I now associate Lorelei King with the series in audio, listening to the books has helped with that feeling of disorientation.
And I just found this from JE on her non-fiction writing book (http://www.evanovich.com/books/how-i-write/): Three people are actually responsible for writing this book. Alex, my webmaster daughter, is the third author. When asked if she preferred the money or the glory, there wasn’t a contest, so for design purposes Alex’s name isn’t on the cover. Bad enough we had to fit Evanovich on once, much less twice!
I only ever read “Age of innocence ” by Edith Wharton but wanted to check out “House of mirth ” for quite some time . Thank you.
And the Band Played On (I’ve read it three times) is also written in such a compelling, urgent way that you don’t necessarily need to care that much about the subject to be sucked in by the prose. It’s a great, thrilling read. There’s some controversy over its characterization of the Patient Zero theory, but that’s a quibble I find easy to ignore given how important and well-written the book is.
I really like Wharton’s books but as with artists from the naturalist aesthetic school, they are grim, grim, grim. _The House of Mirth_ is my favorite of hers, and I find it to be the anti-romance novel. Readers familiar with common themes and plots of genre romance will encounter many of them turned upside down here.
@Peggy S.: I thought the controversy over “Patient Zero” was about the way the book was marketed rather than the actual text? The text says that some people thought he was the guy who brought HIV to the US but that it was a designation used for some reason I can’t remember now which was completely innocuous. Did I have that wrong?
@Kaetrin: I’m vaguely aware of the controversy but not the particulars. I thought that the idea that Gaetan Dugas was “Patient Zero” was somewhat in dispute, at least. I’m guessing it doesn’t help that his portrayal in the book was pretty withering. Shilts did not have much sympathy for those he felt were in denial and thus spreading the disease.
@Jennie: The book was certainly marketed by the publisher as unveiling “Patient Zero” but IIRC, the book itself said that some (many?) people misunderstood what the designation Patient Zero actually meant and there was, as a result, a perception that Gaetan was responsible (almost singlehandedly!) for the epidemic. I can’t now remember what Patient Zero actually meant but it wasn’t anything sinister.
Gaetan wasn’t portrayed that favourably in the book, no. If what Shilts reported about him is true (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), he was advised that he had a serious (likely fatal) sexually transmitted disease and ought not expose sexual partners to it; he ignored that advice and continued to have (a lot of) unsafe sex. I understand he wrote his own book though – maybe he has a different story.
I read one of Evanovich’s daughter’s books. It was dull and cliched. I liked the early Stephanie Plum books, but the ones co-written by other authors are like champagne the next morning — lukewarm, flat and nothing like the real thing. I gave up on the Plum books some time ago. I read a few of the others, Motor Mouth, Lizzie and Diesel, but nothing stuck.