Night Circus

The advent of a new year often brings about a great deal of reflection about the one slipping into the past. What milestones occurred? What were your favorite movies, songs, sporting triumphs and other such listable things? Of course, here at Musings from a Leather Chair, what I really care about is the best books of 2012, at least out of the ones I read. It seems almost serendipitous that I would read what I hands down consider to be the best book of this year (and perhaps this decade) right at the end of the year, just in the nick of time. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern enthralled me for the last week of 2012 and is how you should usher in 2013.

            Night Circus was a novel I had been hearing about for quite a while. I would see it in bookstores and be drawn to its artsy cover that uses only red, black and white. I wouldn’t know this design was important to the actual plot of the story, but somehow I would feel connected to the book. Of course, I would then hem and haw about paying full price for a hard cover and walk away empty handed. That is until I was in my favorite used bookstore and found a paperback copy. I had it up at the counter as fast as I could move and dove into it as soon as I got home. Instead of then continuing to frantically read, flipping pages in a frenzy of energy, I slowed down. Night Circus is the first book in a long while that I savored. I read carefully, the plot pulling me along at just the right pace, keeping me engrossed in the story but not hurling too much at me at once. I had time to get a feel for each of the different characters and to understand how their lives would intersect by means of the most extraordinary circus ever imagined. It definitely helps that I happened to be on vacation when I was reading the majority of Night Circus. A beach in Jamaica will make anyone pause and linger over something enjoyable, and so I spent my days in the sun with Night Circus in hand, not wanting the story to end but dying to know what would happen next.

            The novel focuses on two competing magicians and their respective protégés, both of whom are pitted against each other in a lifelong competition of endurance and skill. The two young competitors know they are playing against each other but the scope of this test takes time to sink in, and as they each work within the circus to create wonders that are actually magical but taken as enchanting tricks, they slowly fall in love. It is an all-encompassing love that fills them and drives the second half of the novel to its thrilling and completely unexpected conclusion. It is also a relatively believable love, as far as stories go. Marco and Celia, the two illusionists, go through separation and jealousy and all the rest of the hurdles life throws at lovers, and it is their struggle that makes them human. There is something incredibly erotic about the dark setting of the circus and their competition against each other that suits the adult who wants to be enchanted but not coddled. Marco and Celia may possess magic of sorts, but magic isn’t a savior in Night Circus. It is more of a tormenting force kept at bay and twisted for good instead of consuming the world for evil.

            Most of the story takes place within the confines of Le Cirque de Reves, or the Circus of Dreams, a creation thought up by an English theatrical producer and several intriguingly quirky dreamers who attend his infamous Midnight Dinners. What the creators do not know is that one of those dreamers, the mysterious Mr. A.H, is actually Marco’s teacher and building up the circus as the arena for the competition. Still, competition space or no, the circus thrives when it finally becomes a reality, delighting audiences’ world wide with its mystery and its wonders. The circus only opens after dark and while it holds the same features of a circus in the late 1800’s, it also hides magic behind every corner. Think the circus from Water for Elephants plus an infusion of The Prestige type magic with a dash of Harry Potter for flavor. All in all, a delightful space for a novel to tell its story.

            Morgenstern takes an interesting approach to novel writing, splitting her sections into the past and present and working from multiple points of view. Her sections in the present are written in second person and immediately gripping, while her sections in the past are written in the present tense and seems to involve the reader more intimately than other stories. She is skilled at leaving mysteries for the reader to figure out. A character is never presented from all sides. There are parts to everyone that are left in the dark and we never fully get to figure any one person out. This makes for an active reading experience, as I was certainly always trying to piece things together and figure out the puzzle before the story would let me. I believe it is the mark of Morgenstern’s elegance and craft that this mystery did not distract me from the story but made me love it even more. Her words are straightforward but intoxicating, poetic but crisp at the same time. By the end of the novel I agreed with every review that was calling Night Circus “hauntingly beautiful” because that is exactly what it is.

            If you want magic, love, adventure, growing up, deception, action, dark fairytales and a down right beautifully suspenseful novel, read Night Circus. I am dubbing it the best book of 2012 and certainly looking forward to any more work Morgenstern produces in the future.

Vision Quest

When I first started reading Vision Quest all I could think about was how different it was from the movie. I’d only seen the film about a week before and still had scenes playing back through my head. I know it’s a horrible thing to see the movie before you read the book in certain literary circles, but this time I don’t mind. Once I settled myself into the book, I discovered that what Terry Davis created in his words was a story that is touching and relevant and something a film can only dream of capturing.

            It’s not often that I pick up a book about a sport I haven’t played. High school wrestling is one of those niche markets that most authors don’t try and hit. But the book came highly recommended by my boyfriend, a former high school wrestler himself, and so I wanted to give it a go. I’m actually not that out of the loop when it comes to the high school wrestling scene. I had several friends in high school that wrestled and I sat through lunch with them, commiserating as I lost weight for pole vaulting and they for their respective weight class. They were good guys, most of them smart and funny and absolutely intent on being the best wrestlers in the state. The indoor track team of which I was a member also practiced in the gym at the same time as the wrestling team. I’ve witnessed practices like those Davis describes in the book and let me tell you, he isn’t making a single thing up. Wrestling is hard and sweaty work.

            Now to get back to the actual novel. Vision Quest is the story of senior wrestler Louden Swain. Louden has decided in his senior year to drop down to the 147 weight class instead of wrestling in his usual 154 place in order to wrestle against Gary Shute. The entirety of the story leads up to this match between the two, following Louden as he loses the weight and lives his life preparing for a moment that may define him for the rest of it. Between the opening lines and the handshake of the match against Shute, the reader discovers a boy who you can’t help but like.

The novel is character driven, concentrating more on the people within in the story instead of the story itself. The plot moves along, but falls in secondary to the exploration the author is making of teenagers on the brink of adulthood. Louden is at times the “muscle-bound, sex-crazed” jock that one might expect from this novel. He utterly kills himself for the sake of his sport, and spends an awful lot of time contemplating and having sex with his girlfriend Carla. Carla conveniently lives in the Swain house, a stray of sorts brought into the family through a bad car deal.  She and Louden make a cute couple. Carla is a free spirit, uninhibited and a little goofy. Actually Carla is a refreshing take on a teenage girl. She doesn’t seem concerned with fitting in and impressing people. She’s comfortable being herself, making up funny names for animals and following through on her generally crazy ideas. Louden is the same. He’s a kid who likes to think about things and the prose follows his mental wanderings as he connects his life now to moments in his past. It would be easy to become fed up with how Louden’s narration jumps from thought to thought and seems to follow a winding trail to no particular point, but he draws you in. He’s a nice person who appreciates his life and the chance he’s been given and all he wants is to understand the world he’s living in. He’s dedicated and funny and sweet, the kind of kid every high school teacher loves.

Louden is a rare literary treat in a sea of coming of age novels where the protagonist is angst ridden or arrogant or down right unlikable. John Irving has been quoted saying Vision Quest is “the truest novel about growing up since The Catcher in the Rye,” and I am willing to go out on a limb and say this surpasses Catcher by a mile. Louden realizes what he feels as he prepares for the Shute match is a sense of growing up. His self-awareness is remarkable and I fear to write more about him because I’ll simply ramble on about what a lovely protagonist he makes. However, I do want to address the sports genre as a whole and how Vision Quest magically avoids the pitfalls that usually come along with it.

We’ve all gone to see a sports movie or read a sports book and right from the get go we know that the end will result in one of two things. Either the protagonist will win and everything will work out in the end or they will lose but still triumph in having tried their best. Remember the Titans: They win the state championship and rise above racial segregation. Yay. Cool Runnings: They lose but gain the respect of the world. With each of these endings the audience is left just slightly unsatisfied. If they win then we all scoff and say “well of course, the entire movie was about them,” but if they lose then we are sad because who wants to watch a movie that ends on a downer? Vision Quest deftly handles this question. No I’m not telling you the ending. I’m telling you that you might be surprised.

So what do we have? We have a likeable character living out a slightly impossible dream. We have a sports novel that’s more about growing up and figuring out who you are than the final score of every match. We have a book that is worth the read, despite your age and interest in high school wrestling. I’m giving total credit to my boyfriend for encouraging me to read this one and am now telling you to do the same. Enjoy!

Greetings from afar.

Hello folks. I've been remiss about posting lately. It's certainly not that I haven't been reading. In fact it could have been a case of reading too much and not being able to stop myself from jumping into the next book I had waiting on my shelf.
Anyways, here are several snippet reviews. Have fun!

Anna Karenina
I've been meaning to read this book forever. It's been placed on a pedestal in the cannon of literature, and I would have felt awfully guilty if I went to see the movie this Christmas and hadn't read the source material for it. To be honest, I should have saved myself the trouble.
Tolstoy's crowning achievement is a sweeping family epic to be sure, following the lives of multiple families whose lives all seem to intertwine. For the first two hundred pages I was swept up in a world of unhappy marriages, illicit affairs, romance and scandal all glossed with the faint chill of Russian Aristocratic society. I would have been happy had the book ended there, with the title character in the throes of her affair and the rest of the characters generally wallowing in misery. Alas, it does not end there.
The novel continues. It goes on and on, bogging down in the middle as Tolstoy explains the plight of the Russian peasant and the varying views on agriculture held in the day. His characters become internal, each locked inside their own heads, barely acknowledging the feelings of others because they are too busy analyzing every moment of their own lives. I fault Tolstoy for creating people that must feel everything in such a catastrophic and melodramatic way. The slightest glance askew from a lady at the table sends a man into an existential crisis, or a fit of melancholy. There is no reality in this attempt to create just that. I will say that Tolstoy gets Anna's characterization spot on. She is unhappy in her marriage, finds a new man who thrills and loves her, but soon finds that even the man of her dreams cannot make her happy. Anna has a quick wit and a confidence about her that I enjoyed, in the beginning. Sadly by the end I'd grown tired of her whining about how she was unhappy despite not making any effort to change her circumstances.
Please don't get me wrong. I respect Tolstoy and the great achievement that this novel is. Anyone who can even vaguely carry on a story for at least seven hundred pages deserves some sort of credit. In this case however, there are too many words and I was lost in them as they washed over me. By the end of the novel I didn't even care that a character had thrown themselves under a train. It was one sentence among thousands, and the singular mention of that particular characters fate.
I would be willing to delve deeper into Russian Literature and find out why this characterization of intrinsic thinking seems to be such a theme among authors of that time and place. I like the pursuit of academia. For the lay reader though, I will give you this advice. See the movie. It's most likely combined all the parts of the novel that are exciting into one coherent story and left the Russian peasants for high school history lessons.

Protector of the Small Quartet
Now here are novels that I can get behind. This is another series by my favorite young adult author Tamora Pierce. The four books follow the story of Keladry of Mindelan, the first girl to openly try for her knighthood. The story is set in the familiar medieval and magical world of Tortall and is full of characters who have already had Pierce quartets of their own.
Kel is headstrong and has no magical ability. She succeeds based on her sheer strength of will, which while coming off a bit outrageous when she's eleven, forms a character that women can both relate to and respect as Kel comes of age. Her group of friends are funny, smart and loyal and the novels move along at a good clip, never spending too much time stressing any one particular idea.
I love Tamora Pierce because she writes characters that I would want to be friends with, and Kel is no exception. I'm loathe to go on about this series too much more, because it will only be me fan-girling my way through the entire plot. I'll leave it at this. If you want action, romance, friendship and one bad ass woman making her way in the world, then this is the series for you.  I can whip through each of the books in a few hours so it's perfect when you want a quick escape into a world of fantasy where you don't need to think an awful lot to be swept up in the story.

Well if you've stayed with me this far then you are definitely the ones I want reading this last bit. I need you folks to spread the word about me and my blog. I've graduated from college, I"m working on my master's in the summer but right now I'm trying to find a job. Substitute teaching (where I am at this very moment in time) is a rewarding gig right now, but I want to write and share books with people like you. If you know of people looking for writers/editors/someone to read manuscripts and decide what should get published, leave me a message here and tell me about it. I will even reward you with a review of your choice. Or a short story. Or brownies. Take your pick.

One last side note! I know, I can just see you rolling your eyes and closing the page right now, but wait. I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month and am about half way through right now. If anyone else is doing this, let's be writing buddies. You can find me under "thinking of the sea"

Cheers!

So Many New Books!

Hi everyone. The New York Times book section just published this article about all the fantastic books coming out this fall. I'm definitely getting my hands on some of them, most exciting being McEwan and Rowling's new works!

Yay New Books

In the meantime, more quick reviews coming as well as a longer one once I finish the novel I'm reading now. Cheers!

Reviews in Brief

I've been on a bit of a reading spree and find myself unable to finish up a proper length review before I dive into the next book, so I thought I'd give you some quick snippets instead. All three of these novels are (unexpected) quality and deserve a mention.

Cox
This was my other pick at the Heathrow airport. I'm a rower and there is never any sort of fiction about the sport, so when my eye caught the title of this book I was thrilled. I was even more thrilled when I looked at the cover more closely and discovered that someone had managed to take all of the sexual innuendo that rowing generates and turn it into a romance novel. Cox does manage to escape most romance novel pitfalls (no bodice ripping or heath wandering here) but in the end it is a story that I loved because it was set in Oxford and about rowers. I doubt many other people would share my utter glee, but it's worth a peek at least. There are some yummy Olympic hopefuls, and enough reality to keep things grounded and moving along.

Falling in Love with English Boys
This novel takes the form of a blog written by a sixteen year old spending the summer in England. She's been dragged there by her mother and does not expect to enjoy herself much. However she manages to find her very own Prince William and the story takes the typical course of young adult romance. However, the saving grace lies in the narrator Cat's interest in things other than boys and lip gloss. Her story is paired with a diary of a young girl from the 19th century that Cat is supposedly reading. The two plots intertwine nicely and the inclusion of historical elements that show up in both stories is refreshing. Cat also finds herself spending time with a truly amazing group of friends, who are glamorous and intelligent, and best of all, willing to take Cat under their wings and be a good friend to her. I found myself wishing I could hang out with this group of girls too. There is a universal appeal to this novel that lends itself to recommendation, particularly to those who enjoy a good snarky young adult protagonist without actually reading a young adult novel.

Water for Elephants
I committed the cardinal sin of book lovers when it came to this novel, and saw the movie first. However, the book is amazing and much better than the film, although I will say the film does it justice. The author has taken the time to understand old time circuses and the detail of both sides of that world is gripping and powerful. I never wanted to put this book down, the characters are that well done and the story that compelling. Having the narrator switch back and forth from being an old man trapped in a nursing home to being his spry twenty three year old self works well, and my compassion for him builds as the novels goes on, so that by the end of the story you are gunning for him to make it, no matter his age. There is romance, intrigue and action, all gritty and intense and a must read for anyone who loves books.

Right, so there you go. Hope you find something excellent to read. Perhaps in exchange tell some people about this blog and start following it yourself!
Cheers.

The Stranger's Child

Picking up a book at Heathrow airport is a special process. You are choosing what form of entertainment will singularly be available to you for the next seven or so hours. It’s a rather daunting choice when you look at it closely, and lets face it, airports aren’t exactly known for their stellar selection of novels. Imagine my surprise when I stepped into the bookshop at Heathrow on my way back from Oxford and found Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, staring me down from an upper shelf. The store was offering a buy 1, get 1 deal, and since I already had one book in my hand, I found myself grabbing this one with the vague remembrance of reading another Hollinghurst novel earlier in the year. For those of you who are already familiar with Hollinghurst and his general subject matter, you will appreciate the wonderful irony of the other book I was holding being titled Cox. For those of you unfamiliar with this author, his agenda must be put rather bluntly. Hollinghurst is a gay author writing about gay characters; with the goal of breaking the established divide between a love story and a gay love story.

            In this particular novel, the reader is treated to not just one gay character, but many, spanning the decades of the sweeping family drama. Hollinghurst introduces his readers to Cecil Valance, a charming young Cambridge poet, who is visiting his friend (and lover) George’s house for the weekend. With his brash wit and unmatchable belief is his own desirability, Cecil leaves the household in a whirlwind of varying feelings and memories, that are followed throughout the subsequent sections of the story, long after Cecil himself has faded into the background. Particularly embroiled in this ongoing story is George’s younger sister Daphne, whose presence throughout the rest of the novel serves as the continuous thread for the story, even as sections deviate away from her personal thoughts and into those of outsiders trying to understand the part she played in the famous poet’s life.

            This segmented structure of the novel seems to be an attempt to keep things fresh and the reader interested over the course of five hundred plus pages. Hollinghurst only lets the reader begin to understand where the narrator is coming from and what they aim to do before rapidly shifting, often moving ahead in time at least a decade or two. We meet George, Daphne, a confident schoolmaster called Peter, and Paul, a nervous biographer, and finally a bookseller called Rob. The novel loses steam in the sections that are told from Peter and Paul’s point of view, partially because they occur within a similar time frame and introduce many of the same figures we’ve already seen. Paul is also simply an unlikable man, too nervous about his sexuality to ever be happy and too overconfident in his ability to write Cecil’s biography to ever have much success. The last section of course calls this initial assessment into question, but then again, that seems to be the last sections purpose anyways. Towards the end of the novel, the question of which narrator can the reader trust comes up, as earlier points of view are discredited in their old age and newer ones are revealed to have been keeping vast secrets. In the end it seems Hollinghurst aims to leave the reader guessing, and perhaps even a bit unsatisfied with the knowledge that we may never truly know what happened in a particular instance, even if we were there. No amount of later research, or discovery of lost books will help us to piece together the mystery. It is simply lost to the blowing smoke of time.

            The one true fault I find in this novel, besides its pacing issues in the middle, is Hollinghurst’s obsession with not writing about sex. He swiftly draws his characters into erotic situations, hinting like mad at all the dirty thoughts going through the men’s minds, and yet when the moment comes, he immediately cuts away to a different scene. The reader is left with barely a coherent suggestion of what happened. While this works in the context of the novel, and does go against the increase of sex for sex’s sake in many recent novels, there were moments when all I wanted was to have some details instead of heavily veiled hints! In this day and age no one is truly shocked by two men having sex, and there are certainly ways to write erotically without descending into pornography and sacrificing the literary art the author strives for. The Stranger’s Child as been touted by other reviewers as “one of the best novels published this year” and “a remarkable, unmissable achievement.” While I’m not ready to throw my hat in with those calling it the best novel of the year, I will say that for it’s broad scope and slippery subject matter, Alan Hollinghurst has written a novel of substance and charm that is worth putting one’s energies into.

His Dark Materials Series

I never read the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife & The Amber Spyglass) when I was a child. I remember hearing about them, and the buzz they created, and I even managed to finish the first book, The Golden Compass, but somewhere along the way I was distracted. I’m here to tell you that that distraction was perhaps the best thing that happened to me in my literary journey, since I have now finally finished the series, while living in Oxford and as an adult that understands the profound beauty and power of Philip Pullman’s sweeping epic.

I found myself initially intrigued by the main character, a supposedly orphan girl named Lyra who runs wild over Oxford, while being brought up by the many scholars at Jordan College. Lyra is headstrong and lacks manners and polish. I found myself oscillating between liking her and finding her difficult to take seriously. She is at one moment a child, willful and selfish, and at the next moment wise beyond her years. Pullman has captured that strange stage of growing up, where on the brink of adolescence we are all caught between the adult and childhood world. While navigating growing up in circumstances far from normal, Lyra introduces us to a world that is similar to ours but with just enough unusual quirks to keep us guessing. The most obvious quirk of course is that each human being has a daemon, an animal projection of their soul that can shift shape during childhood and then settles on a fixed form when the person reaches adult hood. These are not pets but an extension of that person’s being, and Pullman is brilliant for having come up with such a concrete concept for the human soul.

Lyra’s companion through the series is a serious boy called Will, who is about Lyra’s age but has none of her childish frivolity. He is determined to find his father, cares for his mother deeply, and finds himself caught up on an adventure that changes his destiny. Will is my favorite character by far, perhaps because I forget he is only about thirteen. He sees the world as it is and is quite capable in all of the unlikely and fantastic situations he finds himself in. His devotion to his mother is heartbreaking and his ability to carry the heavy burden placed upon him towards the middle of the series with grace and humility makes him the ideal hero. Reading Will again made me forget that these are books aimed at children, for I could see the man he would grow to become and admired him immensely.

We of course met other memorable characters over the course of the three novels, including Serafina Pekkala, a witch of great age and beauty; Lee Scroesby, an aeronaut from Texas; Iorek Byrnison, an armored bear; Lord Asriel, a man hell-bent on destroying God and Mrs. Coulter, a woman whose beauty and charm hides a dark and complex inner-self. This cast is strong, vitally described and haunting and funny in their turn, pushing Lyra and Will along their prophesized journey.

I feel it would be foolish to even attempt a summary of the plot of His Dark Materials, for Pullman has achieved a story that is on par with the breadth and depth of Tolkien and Lewis. There are worlds upon worlds to be discovered, people of all kinds, magic and theology melting together into a swirl of fantasy that takes up the reader and only sets them down after they’ve experience grief, elation, uncertainty and triumph. The language never condescends, and in fact I often found myself wondering how on earth these were children’s books at all? There is so much in them that made me, an adult, pause and think and therein lies the delight. A child may read them for the adventure, an adult for the theological questions and genuine exploration of emotion and destiny. Just as Lyra and Will don’t understand much of what they’ve done until the very end, the reader may experience the series on multiple levels. It’s ok not to get everything, and even better, it’s better not to be conscious of not knowing. Just as Lyra and Will are unaware of their destinies, the reader goes in without knowing what impact the novels will have on them upon completion. I personally had the tears on standby as I read the last section of The Amber Spyglass, and even during parts of The Subtle Knife. Pullman made me care about every character, never letting someone be purely good or evil, and thus when each character met their particular fate, I felt connected to that result.

His Dark Materials stands out in my mind as a series that must be read, by everyone at some point in their lives. The grace and genius that went into creating this compelling story is something to be astounded by, and I salute Philip Pullman.