Underrated Predictability

The novel Peaches by Jodi Lynn Anderson turned out to be pretty good ( I would say "delicious" but puns are overrated). The story was pretty sad at first because Birdie's farm is going under and her dad is a divorced, sad, fat old man with no hope left in him, about to sell to a skeevy resort owner. Her dejection and lack of confidence at the beginning of the novel is intensely annoying because she keeps comparing herself to her "perfect" cousin, Leeda. She also is an emotional eater - she's described as a little on the chunky side and she's always holding or near some type of food (mostly Girl Scout cookies. It makes me hungry). Leeda, who is far from perfect, is annoying too, half the time going on and on about how her sister is preferred over her (although it doesn't really make me hate her, just her mom who is an *expletive*), the other half spent talking about Rex, her supposedly hunky yet unacceptable boyfriend. Murphy is the only girl who didn't host a pity party 99.9% of the first half of the book. She's feisty and quick-witted and I like her sarcastic, dry sense of humor. She's a B.A! Although she is a little promiscuous...oh well! She's the best! The good part is that this dejectedness only lasts until the three girls become friends, sneak out and then actually start working, picking peaches. Birdie starts losing weight, acting a little less like an emo second grader, and meets a boy! Ah, the comfort of predictable teenage fiction. It's not a YA novel without boys getting in the way. By the way, Rex starts liking Murphy. Yikes! My favorite part, though, is when Murphy tells off Leeda's mom for not respecting Leeda, and treating her as if she was worthless. I told you, Murphy's feisty! It didn't make anyone happy, but that doesn't matter. Conflict is exciting, especially when the villians get their just desserts. The predictability of this novel was a nice change from Never Let Me Go and Atonement and the diction was much easier to understand, although I do like the challenge of elevated diction that literary fiction has to offer. I like the combination of easy and difficult reading; it makes for an interesting week. Plus, all of my posts don't have to sound pretentious. (At least, that's how I see it. I may flatter myself I sound more intelligent than I actually do).

I Moustache You A Question, I'll Shave It For Later

Atonement by Ian McEwan is an exceptionally enthralling novel, not due to any particular excitement that has happened thus far but because of the interesting conundrum of what Briony, the quiet thirteen year-old author/playwright, is going to do next. I already know she's going to "commit a crime" because McEwan says so in chapter thirteen, but I'm still confused as to what that particular crime will be. Maybe I should just start from the beginning.

Atonement is set in England during the summer of 1935. It follows the Tallis family: Cecilia, Briony, and their mother, Emily Tallis. Some chapters are also from the view of Robbie Turner, the laundress's son. Basically what its about is Briony has been writing a play because her cousins are coming to stay with them and she wants them to perform it. Well, Lola and the twins, Pierrot and Jackson, manage to screw that up (Lola, seemingly, on purpose) so the play never really gets off the ground. But its not about The Trials of Arabella, its about the, pardon me, sexual tension Briony witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie. Being only thirteen, she really doesn't understand whats going on and seems to think Robbie's a maniac who has some weird hold over Cecilia. Needless to say, she doesn't get it. Robbie has mad passionate love for Cecilia and writes some weird stuff on his typewriter about her. Deciding sending her that "weird stuff" would be, well, inappropriate, he drafts a handwritten letter. But, as these things do happen, the letters got switched (shocking, isn't it?) so now Cecilia gets the really kinda gross letter from Robbie. The worst part is that he asks Briony to deliver it and being the annoying little twit that she is, she reads it. Briony misunderstands the letter and starts to repeatedly call Robbie a "maniac." Of course, she also witnesses some naughty things in the library so its not really all in her head, she just has a wild imagination and no "grasp of adult motives" as McEwan puts it. Amid all this chaos, Cecilia and Robbie admitting their love to each other and Briony freaking out about protecting Cecilia, something weird is happening between cousin Lola and older brother Leon Tallis's friend Paul Marshall. There's a scene where he gives her some chocolate and is nice to her, but the next you hear of them Lola has a scratch and bruises on her arm and Paul has a scratch on his unfortunately smushed-looking face. And as if the book couldn't get any more mysterious/weird, the twins run away and are nowhere to be found. I will stop here because that's the farthest I've gotten.

I really am enjoying this book. It's got some great lines, especially a paragraph where McEwan describes what a story really is: "A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader - no intermediaries with their private ambitions of incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same things; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. you saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade..." I find I really connect with this paragraph because it exactly describes what I think of when I think of reading a novel or a book. How losing yourself in a good story can seemingly transport you to that time and place, make the story your story, the things happening things that actually happened to you. Reading is an escape and it makes anything possible.

I definitely recommend this book to you, but if your mother would perhaps not appreciate her son/daughter reading some rather crude material I suggest you put it down and walk away.

P.S. Is it weird to have a slight obsession with moustaches?

P.P.S. What's your favorite joke/silly saying?

Water For Elephants

When I think of the circus, I always remember the commercial that plays in my town whenever the circus visits. The kids yelling "come on, everyone, let's go to the circus," the theme song and then the little ditty at the end, "three rings of fun!" In the novel Water For Elephants, you're introduced to the behind-the-scenes of The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth, a traveling circus set amid the Great Depression. The novel centers on Jacob Jankowski, and switches from his life as a ninety-three year old man living in a nursing home to his perspective as the twenty-three year old veterinarian for this sub-par circus (despite its name as the "Most Spectacular Show On Earth" the circus is "probably not even the fiftieth most spectacular show on earth,"). The novel is actually really interesting and while some parts may be a little inappropriate for a teenager of my age, so far I've really enjoyed it. The part that I like the most is that before some of the chapters are pictures from actual traveling circuses that existed during the Great Depression. My favorite picture so far is from the Tegge Circus Archives of an elephant getting off of a train car. I've never really appreciated what gargantuan creatures elephants are until I saw this photograph. I'd show you the exact photo in the novel, but sadly I cannot find it online. So instead here's a picture of another elephant I find just as intriguing. 

So anyway as I said, the novel centers around Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student studying at Cornell. He's only a day away from taking his final and being able to graduate when he hears his parents have been killed in a car accident. He's left with nothing because his father, who was a veterinarian (Jacob was going to join his practice), was so in debt from taking on patients for free, working for goods instead of money, and taking a mortgage on the house to pay for Jacob's Ivy League education, everything left belonged to the bank. Jacob doesn't take his exam but instead walks out in the middle of it and unknowingly jumps a traveling circus train, The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth. He meets a really old guy named Camel who decides he could get Jacob a job with the circus. When they learn he's a vet (or close to being one, seeing as he didn't graduate) the brutal ringleader, Uncle Al, takes him on to work in the menagerie, with all the animals. Through his job he meets the man in charge of all of the animals, the paranoid schizophrenic August Rosenbluth (August is described as being able to be charming at times and brutal at others) and his lovely performer wife, Marlena, on whom Jacob harbors a crush. There are many bumps along to line: Jacob sharing a room with a performing dwarf named Kinko (Walter, to his friends) and his dog Queenie, August being vicious and unfeeling towards everyone, having to put down Marlena's favorite horse, and continually running out of food for the animals because neither August nor Uncle Al really care about them other than they make money. It's obvious Jacob continues to develop feelings for Marlena, and the feelings may be reciprocated. Alas, I've only read to page 145, so I've yet to find out. More on the romance later.

So far, I've enjoyed this novel and can't wait to see the movie adaptation that comes out in April, starring Robert Pattinson as Jacob, Reese Witherspoon as Marlena Rosenbluth and Christoph Waltz as her husband, August (Waltz always plays such a good villain, in my opinion). It'll be interesting to see how close they've stuck to the novel. I always hate it when movies stray from the novel they're adapting. So fingers crossed for a good movie worth the 8 dollars!