Summer Lovin'

A Vintage Affair
Isabel Wolff
Harper Collins

Okay, haters, er, I mean loyal blog readers ... I have an admission to make that just might provoke images of the apocalypse.   Prepare yourselves.  Ready?  I bought a Kindle a few weeks ago.  An even bigger admission?  I LOVE IT!!!

I never in a million years thought that I would become a fan of the e-reader.   I'm a committed bibliophile, for goodness sake, and I have shelves, cupboards, cabinets and nightstands brimming with books that have already been loved or are waiting to be read.   The smoothness of a cover between my fingers, the weight of a novel in my hand, or that delicious feeling that I get when I manage to read a 800 page tome without ever cracking the spine just thrill me.  Utterly.   The act of reading is as much a part of the experience as the words on the page.  Or so I thought.

A Vintage Affair was my first e-read and I absolutely adored it.  Set in Hempstead, Phoebe Swift, a former Sotheby's clothing specialist decides to open a vintage clothing store and in the process, works through some of her own baggage from the past.  Dealing with the death of a close friend and a failed relationship, Phoebe throws herself into her work and forges new ties that help her face her past.  This is a lovely story -- let's call it chick lit with substance -- and I highly recommend it as a solid summer read.

In fact, I had been curiously attracted to the cover of this novel a number of times in the bookstore, but refused to buy it because I didn't want to pay trade paper back prices for "chick lit."  The Kindle edition was much cheaper and, well, I found the reading experience to be completely different, but curiously, no less enjoyable.  I guess once you get lost in a good book the rest just falls away.  A Vintage Affair gets three cupcake dresses out of five. 

L'Élégance du hérisson

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery

Europa Editions

I don't know if I loved this book because it made me feel somewhat educated and slightly cultured, or because it made me feel entirely dull-witted and slow. I definitely had moments of both while reading this text and I am sorely pressed to say which captured me more.

Set in an elegant Parisian apartment, the novel intertwines the narratives of two of the building's residents -- Renée Michel, the building's dumpy, slow, and stereotypical French concierge, and Paloma Josse, a twelve-year old girl, whose understanding of the absurdities of life would put Ionesco to shame. Both characters go to great lengths to hide themselves from the outer world. Renée portrays herself as others expect her to be and she lives a clandestine life full of philosophy, music, art, culture and custom. Paloma hides by retreating into herself, rarely speaking, but keeping a journal of profound thoughts and movements. If I were still an academic, I think I would be tempted to construct a semester-long course around this novel. You could easily spend weeks discussing the ideas that each character presents.

What made this novel especially beautiful was the author's use and range of language. Even in translation, I was caught by Barbery's lush descriptions and gorgeous phrasing. She can find the rightness in quoting a lyric from Eminem as easily as she can find it in a passage from Tolstoy. The book was just so full of Beauty that I felt like I was breathing fresh air through my eyes. Five heartfelt sighs out of five.

I Love a Rainy Night

The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield
Anchor Canada

Yesterday was almost perfect. When I woke up, I put on the radio, made a nest of the covers on my bed and snuggled back in for an extra half hour of sheer laziness. Once I finally roused myself, I randomly grabbed a book off the nightstand, popped it into my bag and headed out the door for the day.

I started reading The Thirteenth Tale at the hair salon. It next came out of my bag over lunch at the mall. I really meant to go for a run in the afternoon, but instead I found myself curled up on the couch unable to put the book down. At suppertime, I had to tear myself away to meet my friend Janice for dinner. I considered bringing it along in case she was late and even went so far as to put it in my purse. I took it out at the last minute -- didn't want to seem rude.

When I got back to the house, I contemplated watching some television or putting in a DVD. That thought lasted, oh, maybe thirty seconds. Instead, I took up the book and read until it was done. It was totally worth it. In fact, I liked the book so much that I'm not going to tell you what it was about. It stands a pretty good chance of being the D-E-S book of the year and I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise. Four melodramatic twists out of five.

Darling Nikki

In the Cut

Susanna Moore

Vintage

While I wouldn't exactly describe myself as particularly well-read, I will admit that I consciously try to maintain an open mind when it comes to selecting titles. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you'll notice that I prefer fiction to non-fiction, I've got a decidedly unhealthy relationship with fantasy literature, and aside from the occasional memoir, I'm not much for biography.

One of the genres that has been suspiciously absent from my repertoire has been erotica. I'm not sure why it hasn't made the queue (might be the recovering Lutheran in me,) but in the same way that I've never watched a porn flick, smut, as my mother terms it, has never held much appeal. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself quite engaged by In the Cut -- an erotic crime novel set in Giuliani's NYC.

I will not mince words -- the narrator (a cunning linguist) was, at times, quite vulgar. There are no euphemisms for the sex act in this novel -- just raw, dirty words. Maybe it's because the narrator was a woman, but I didn't feel that the female gender was being objectified by the text. In fact, from a characterization perspective, this book is the perfect foil for Chandler's depiction of the sexes. The women in Moore's novel are complicated, well-drawn and curiously detached. The men, on the other hand, are willful creatures controlled by passions and motivated by desire. The inversion of standard sexual convention was quite intriguing and to be candid the ending to this novel was brilliantly done. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this genre any time soon, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself. Three anima/animus out of five.