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It's time for my yearly wrap up of books read in 2011! Before I create my collage of covers, here are a few fun statistics:
Total Books: 74
Fiction/Nonfiction: 70 / 4
Re-reads: 4
Top Genres: Fantasy (26); Historical fiction (18); Mystery (8)
Rather than apologize profusely for my absence from the blogging world, I'm actually going to give myself permission to take the rest of the year off from my blog. It's not for lack of love of this blog or any of my fab readers and it's certainly not for lack of great books to write about. Rather, this has been one of those months where life has thrown me for some loop-de-loops and in an effort to simplify, I'm allowing myself to take a breather. That's not to say that this will be my last blog of the year and that's not a promise that come January things will return to normal, but it's just an announcement that if I'm not here with my typical frequency, keep heart - I will be back.
With that said, I really can't resist jumping in on today's Top Ten Tuesday topic: Favorite Books Read in 2011. As usual, I can't actually limit this to ten, but with 70+ books finished this year, this list does still represent the cream of the crop!
Favorite YA Fiction:
First comes the apology for my unexpected blogging hiatus. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was a bit under the weather last week. Once I was feeling more human, I was busy playing catch-up at work and trying to get ready for the holidays (service projects, card writing, shopping, party planning). But as a very special return post, I'm happy to share a review of a book that impressed my socks off - happy Christmas socks, that is, featuring little puppies and kitties in Santa hats... the socks, not the book.
I must admit that I had this book on my "To Read" list for a long time and was unfairly prejudiced against the story - which I assumed would revolve primarily around gender identity issues. What I found was a book that did deal with gender and sexuality, but through the eyes of a witty and unique narrator that I came to love, because I was first introduced to his captivating family saga. I was swept up by the Stephanides's history and as Cal interspersed his own struggles into the tale - complete with a decent dose of science and genetics - I felt like a member of the family. I'm also not normally swayed by awards and accolades on book covers, but Middlesex deserves all the praise and attention it has received. I was thoroughly amazed by this book and can easily say it's one of the best I have read this year.Ambitious in scope and epic in execution, Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides is an amazing story not just for its sweeping family saga but for its remarkable narrator. Calliope "Cal" Stephanides is a hermaphrodite - genetically male but raised as a female - and the genetic mutation that led to his condition is rooted in the history of his family. Though Cal is introduced immediately, the majority of the story is told in the past - from Cal's grandparents, Greek immigrants Lefty and Desdemona; to his parents Milton and Tessie.
The unique relationships between the two couples is almost as captivating as their surroundings. Settling in Detroit, Michigan, Lefty and Desdemona's tale corresponds to the city's glory days of Ford. As the next generation takes the focus of the narration, the landscape shifts as well and Cal's parents witness the race riots of the sixties and follow the white exodus to suburban Grosse Pointe, where Cal and his brother are raised.
Eugenides succeeds not only in revealing the complex history of Detroit, but in telling the book with an amazing flair for detail. Some of the characters are painted so richly with personalities that jump off the page while others are classified precisely by their lack thereof. Cal's parents were complete with their own back-stories, hobbies, quirks, and talents; meanwhile Cal's brother is only ever referred to cleverly as "Chapter Eleven". Everything about the story feels real and more than once I found myself running an internet search on a business, neighborhood, or event to distinguish facts from Eugenides's fiction.
"There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house." ~Joe Ryan
"Once there was a miller who was poor, but who had a beautiful daughter. Now it happened that he had to go and speak to the king, and in order to make himself appear important he said to him, 'I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold.'"Notice that the problems all begin because the man was trying to "appear important". The adage of pride before the fall comes to mind here as the story is set in motion. The greedy king locks the girl up with a room full of straw and a spinning wheel and threatens to kill her if she cannot perform the feat by morning. Partly I wonder if this was the king simply trying to call the man's bluff. I have to wonder if the king would really go through with executing a subject - and a beautiful one at that - for what seems to be an obvious exaggeration. So the miller's daughter is more than a little bit stuck. The story tells us:
"She had no idea how straw could be spun into gold, and she grew more and more frightened, until at last she began to weep. But all at once the door opened, and in came a little man..."I'll try not to roll my eyes at why the miller's daughter didn't at least start trying to spin her straw, plead hay fever and demand release, or fess up to her father's lies; but as in many fairy tales, we have a male who comes to her rescue. The stranger creates the gold in exchange for a necklace and when the king's greed causes a repeat of events the miller's daughter turns over a gold ring. (Does anyone ever stop to wonder why, if the miller was so poor, does his daughter have a necklace and a ring that become some pretty hefty bargaining chips? Or why, if Rumpelstiltskin can spin stray into gold, does he have need of the girl's trinkets? Sorry, moving on.) On the third night, the girl is once more thrust into a room of straw and told by the king, "You must spin this, too, in the course of this night, but if you succeed, you shall be my wife."
"'Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child.'"
Who knows whether that will ever happen, thought the miller's daughter, and, not knowing how else to help herself in this strait, she promised the manikin what he wanted, and for that he once more spun the straw into gold."
I know fairy tale heroines are not known for their brains but since the king promised to marry her for one more night of spinning and if Rumpelstiltskin had already delivered a straw to gold transmogrification twice, why didn't she think she would be queen? So the story proceeds with the girl marrying the king, and eventually having a child that Rumpelstiltskin comes to claim. She pleads with him not to take the baby and he offers her a reprieve if she can guess his name. (I have to wonder, how did he help her out three nights in a row and she never asked who he was?) Of course the big "R" is not a name on anyone's lips so the new queen's situation is rather dire. She sends out messengers to seek new names from all the kingdoms and eventually one returns with the following tale of what he observed:"Round about the fire quite a ridiculous little man was jumping, he hopped upon one leg, and shouted -The queen reveals the answer to the guessing game and the peeved little man suffers a rather disastrous fate:
'To-day I bake, to-morrow brew,
the next I'll have the young queen's child.
Ha, glad am I that no one knew
that Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.'"
"...in his anger he plunged his right foot so deep into the earth that his whole leg went in, and then in rage he pulled at his left leg so hard with both hands that he tore himself in two."Typically Grimm, that line is the morbid end to the story. At first, my reaction to this story is one of disdain. None of the characters are exceptionally virtuous, but on second look there are some actual morals to be found. The first may be that honesty is the best policy and that one should not tell lies to make themselves seem more important, but I think the larger lesson revealed is to guard one's words.
