No Frigate

I'm glad I can now post content from Amazon again, but I can't seem to write in the same post that I post any Amazon content?  Anyway, as I suspected it would be, Purple Hibiscus was great -- a really sad, evocative coming-of-age novel.  To me, Half of a Yellow Sun is the better novel, because it's broader in scope and more political, but I think that's a matter of personal preference; I think many readers would be completely enraptured by the intimacy of Purple Hibiscus.

Not one woman?  Not one?

So much to read!  "The Tudors" has been one of my maternity leave standbys, so I was salivating at the prospect of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall even before I read the review in the Sunday paper.  I was also intrigued by the review of Tobias Hill's The Hidden.  Hill sounds like an interesting writer with a broad scope (love the idea of a novel set in the midst of an archeolgical dig), and I've never heard of him before, although he's published three other novels as well as a story collection and some poetry.

Then, to top off these riches, the closing essay in the review was by one of my favorites; Colson Whitehead.  So wry!  So clever!  So true!

I just finished Ian Rankin's Bleeding Hearts, another one of my random library picks.  This was the first Rankin book I'd read outside of the outstanding John Rebus series, and most of it was a slight letdown.  I liked the structure; Rankin alternates perspectives between a hired assassin (written in the first person) and the detective hired to track him down (written in the third person).  The plot was also great; the trouble was that neither the assassin nor the detective felt authentic to me.  Both of them got slightly more authentic as the novel continued, but never enough to really grab me.  I was surprised by this, because character development is one of Rankin's strengths in the Rebus books. 

Character problems aside, Bleeding Hearts was the rare mystery where I really had no idea what the answer was to the central "who done it," and I was legitimately surprised by the ending.

I usually only check things out from the library that I've put on hold, but I was returning something and the kid was behaving in his Bjorn, so I wandered the stacks and grabbed Andrea Lee's Lost Hearts in Italy.  I remember reading some of Lee's short stories in the New Yorker a few years ago, and that, at the very least, they were international and cosmopolitan -- good for someone who's stuck at home a lot at present!  The novel was certainly glamorous; lots of jet-setting in Rome and London, etc., but it was so show-offy that my eyes were rolling a lot.  Lee examines the three participants in a love triangle, writing about each of them in a close third-person -- but she intermittently writes short sections from the perspectives of players on the sidelines.  Waiters, children running along the beach, distant relatives, etc.  I'm sure that was helpful for her process, but for me, it was distracting.

After that, I was lucky enough to have my mother bring me a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire.  Amazing.  Even better than Larsson's first, perhaps.  Again, I'm heartbroken that he's dead.

Yes, my posts are infrequent, but I am reading and thinking about things to read!  I'm just doing it in smaller intervals.  Sadly, what I'm reading right now is pretty disappointing.  I really loved Nuala O'Faolain's memoir, Are You Somebody?, and at some point I picked up her novel, My Dream of You.  In the spirit of getting through the things I already have on my shelf rather than spending money on new things I want to read (see Home Boy), I finally started reading it.  It's (largely) written in the first person, which I usually hate, and the protagonist is such a self-pitying, self-destructive narcissist that the experience of reading the novel is making me think back less fondly on Are You Somebody -- because I suspect that the narrator in My Dream of You is pretty close to Ms. O'Faolain herself.  The only thing that is keeping me reading is the travel writing; the protagonist is a travel writer, and O'Faolain's descriptions of her travels are fun for someone who's basically a shut-in.

 On the kid-rearing side, I'm reading:

Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever

Mem Fox

Although I'm a lawyer, I haven't read that many biographies of Supreme Court justices.  In fact, I think the only one I've read is Thurgood Marshall's.  So I'm surprised that I've repeatedly read reviews of the new Louis Brandeis biography by Melvin Urofsky and thought, "hmmm, I think I'd like to read that!"  Maybe maternity leave has made me more desperate for intellectual rigor than I realized . . .

Louis D. Brandeis: A Life

Melvin Urofsky

Again, problems with the Amazon thing, so no nice picture of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I tried to post this with the picture of the Prospect Park West cover and wasn't able to figure it out.  Anybody?

Here are my (brief) thoughts on PPW:

In my defense, I don't actually live in Park Slope, so I'm not a complete cliche.  Also, a huge group of my friends want to read it, so we're going to pass it around.  And I bought it cheap at the Strand. 

That said, it feels like I'm reading mommy porn.  Or status porn, as Amy Sohn's idea of character development is to name the brands that her characters use or wear.  I would rather know more about the characters' intellectual life and less about where their boy shorts are from, please.  The novel is also really meanspirited towards women (mothers, in particular) as well as racist.

That said, can I put it down?  No.  It's like a wrecked Volvo in the middle of Prospect Park itself; horrible, but you can't look away . . .