Apologies for my recent absence--Fearless Fourteen almost scared me away.
I kid!
Not that the book wasn't relatively awful (thanks again for the warning, Liz), but I've been on vacation this past week, and since work is how I obtain my reading material, generally speaking, I haven't had anything new to read since this time last week.
My husband and I took the week off together, and spent a couple nights in Pittsburgh. I uploaded the pictures to Flickr, and they should be in the sidebar as soon as I get it working.
Once I head back to work (Monday, presumably; I don't have my schedule yet for this week.) I'll have more for you all!
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
The thunder rolls...
It's been a stormy day in bookwench land. When I went out earlier to run errands it was sprinkling, and by the time I got to the store it was simply pouring. Of course, I left my umbrella at work a few weeks ago, and so I did the best I could and parked close to the door.
When I got back home, the sun was shining again, and I curled up on the couch with the windows open to finish Bar Flower, which is a memoir of a young American woman who pursued her dream to live and work in Japan in order to become fluent.
I took Japanese as my foreign language requirement in college, and that certainly originally sparked my interest in this book. Oddly enough, something else that grabbed my attention was the book's size. While hardcover, the size is more similar to a trade paperback. It's just about the perfect heft and size for my hands.
Beyond that, I think I was drawn to this book because I know that never in a million years will I go and live in Japan, despite my interest in the nation's culture both past and present. I am far too "different" to feel comfortable spending extended periods of time amongst people who tend to emphasize sameness and fitting in. As Lea reminds her readers, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And I would certainly stick out like a sore thumb.
So, as in many things, I live vicariously through reading. It's certainly cheaper than travel, no?
Lea starts out teaching English to schoolchildren but loses her job after a particularly unsavory encounter with a psychologist who doesn't have to work under the same privacy limitations that she is used to. When all other options fail, she turns to the thriving bar scene and becomes a bar hostess: a strangely modern evolution of the Japanese geisha.
During my read of this book, I did often think about Arthur Golden's novelization, loosely based on the life of Mineko Iwasaki (whose book I also read and found to resonate perhaps more strongly than the fictional account) , but there were few intersections aside from some more obvious ones. Lea herself is preoccupied with geisha, so these connections are easy to make.
I was actually surprised by the rather abrupt end to Lea's narrative, but it certainly does align with her final exit from the stage of hostessing and addiction. I wish that this part would have been fleshed out a bit more. There were a lot of disorganized, chaotic parts (both in writing and in plot, possibly intentional and symbolic) that could have been more cohesive, and a lot of kind of random information that I wasn't sure where it was going. But this was a memoir and not a novel, and so I tend to be a bit more forgiving, I suppose.
Despite all that, I'm glad I read this one. It was engrossing and interesting and added a new facet to my knowledge of Japanese culture. And it reminded me that I haven't forgotten everything since college--which is always a good thing!
Thunderstorms are rolling through again tonight, so I'm going to wrap this up now and get it posted before the power drops. Tomorrow, Fearless Fourteen, which, thanks to Liz's comments in my previous post, I'll be reading with a grain of salt.
When I got back home, the sun was shining again, and I curled up on the couch with the windows open to finish Bar Flower, which is a memoir of a young American woman who pursued her dream to live and work in Japan in order to become fluent.
I took Japanese as my foreign language requirement in college, and that certainly originally sparked my interest in this book. Oddly enough, something else that grabbed my attention was the book's size. While hardcover, the size is more similar to a trade paperback. It's just about the perfect heft and size for my hands.
Beyond that, I think I was drawn to this book because I know that never in a million years will I go and live in Japan, despite my interest in the nation's culture both past and present. I am far too "different" to feel comfortable spending extended periods of time amongst people who tend to emphasize sameness and fitting in. As Lea reminds her readers, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And I would certainly stick out like a sore thumb.
So, as in many things, I live vicariously through reading. It's certainly cheaper than travel, no?
Lea starts out teaching English to schoolchildren but loses her job after a particularly unsavory encounter with a psychologist who doesn't have to work under the same privacy limitations that she is used to. When all other options fail, she turns to the thriving bar scene and becomes a bar hostess: a strangely modern evolution of the Japanese geisha.
During my read of this book, I did often think about Arthur Golden's novelization, loosely based on the life of Mineko Iwasaki (whose book I also read and found to resonate perhaps more strongly than the fictional account) , but there were few intersections aside from some more obvious ones. Lea herself is preoccupied with geisha, so these connections are easy to make.
I was actually surprised by the rather abrupt end to Lea's narrative, but it certainly does align with her final exit from the stage of hostessing and addiction. I wish that this part would have been fleshed out a bit more. There were a lot of disorganized, chaotic parts (both in writing and in plot, possibly intentional and symbolic) that could have been more cohesive, and a lot of kind of random information that I wasn't sure where it was going. But this was a memoir and not a novel, and so I tend to be a bit more forgiving, I suppose.
Despite all that, I'm glad I read this one. It was engrossing and interesting and added a new facet to my knowledge of Japanese culture. And it reminded me that I haven't forgotten everything since college--which is always a good thing!
Thunderstorms are rolling through again tonight, so I'm going to wrap this up now and get it posted before the power drops. Tomorrow, Fearless Fourteen, which, thanks to Liz's comments in my previous post, I'll be reading with a grain of salt.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Hah.
And once again, your friendly neighborhood Bookwench was consumed by the grind of real life. I offer my apologies.
I don't know what it is about retail that somehow manages to entirely consume your soul from time to time. I've experienced this feeling often around the winter holidays, but the past couple of months have been almost as bad.
My reading list has grown considerably since the last time I wrote, though unfortunately there were truly only a few books of note.
The first that comes to mind, Barbara Walters' Audition, was an unlikely read for me. My store sold out of it almost immediately when it was first released, but after a couple of weeks on the bestseller lists we had a fairly solid standing stock. I would have probably ignored it altogether, however, if it wasn't for the fact that Ms. Walters made an appearance on the Daily Show one night when I just happened to be watching. There was something about her sense of humor, that she would even go on Stewart's show, and the way she handled herself once there, that nudged me into seeing what all the fuss was about.
I'm glad I did.
While the memoir is not, of course, a great work of literature in the traditional sense (sometimes it gets a bit wordy and, dare I say, sentimental), it truly does justice to the extraordinary life that this woman has lived, and is living. If any of you out there are familiar with Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, you might have a similar experience to mine: as I was reading I kept identifying bits and pieces of the book and song that matched up, and I was amused.
Barbara Walters has pretty much lived the last 50+ years of notable American and world history. For someone like myself, who often struggled with history classes in the traditional academic setting, this is a much more accessible and interesting way to gain a greater understanding of "what really happened."
It does seem to me that I've been leaning rather strongly towards nonfiction of late. I go through phases when all I want to read is fiction, and then suddenly nothing in that particular realm interests me in the least; it's as though the oasis had dried up without warning, and all that was left to browse were stones and dry leaves and nothing very interesting at all.
At that point I'm left wandering my usual alternative-reading haunts: biography and science. For me, science is a subject that, in various ways, I clearly did well at in school but once things got to a certain technical level (chemistry, physics) I generally became daunted by the math involved and gave up. So occasionally I'll stumble through those shelves and find something that I can relate to.
This coming week, however, I will allow myself to indulge in what I might normally dismiss as fluff. Honestly, in my most humble, bookwench-y opinion, there's a lot of fluff out there. A great deal of it is not, as they say, relevant to my interests. But Janet Evanovich has a new Stephanie Plum book, Fearless Fourteen, and as I got sucked into that series years ago by my best friend and fellow book-a-holic, I'll give this one a go as I do with each of Evanovich's yearly efforts.
Last year's title, Lean Mean Thirteen, actually made me wonder when the series was finally going to end, because if that was the best the author could do after all that time, surely it was time to call it quits. I know that, generally speaking, all the books have a similar scheme: Plum is desperate, Plum sludges through job, flirts with Ranger, hijinks with Lula and Grandma, gets into a situation more serious than she can handle, calls Joe, blows up a few cars, is rescued, spends a night with Morelli and his dog, eats dinner with parents and newlywed sister (and children), and eventually manages to save the day despite an unbelievable number of fumbles, and all with a spectacular amount of innuendo and humor. Usually these machinations are at least entertaining enough to be worth an hour of so of my time. Last time was the first time I can really say I felt disappointed by the end of the book.
However, I've had a sneak peek at the first few pages of Fourteen, and it seems to be much more promising. So I'm looking forward to that.
I'm also working on another memoir, Bar Flower, that is quite engrossing and will likely merit a post of its own once I finish.
For now, however, it's just about that time where I scuttle off to live amongst the tomes for an hour or eight.
Ta!
I don't know what it is about retail that somehow manages to entirely consume your soul from time to time. I've experienced this feeling often around the winter holidays, but the past couple of months have been almost as bad.
My reading list has grown considerably since the last time I wrote, though unfortunately there were truly only a few books of note.
The first that comes to mind, Barbara Walters' Audition, was an unlikely read for me. My store sold out of it almost immediately when it was first released, but after a couple of weeks on the bestseller lists we had a fairly solid standing stock. I would have probably ignored it altogether, however, if it wasn't for the fact that Ms. Walters made an appearance on the Daily Show one night when I just happened to be watching. There was something about her sense of humor, that she would even go on Stewart's show, and the way she handled herself once there, that nudged me into seeing what all the fuss was about.
I'm glad I did.
While the memoir is not, of course, a great work of literature in the traditional sense (sometimes it gets a bit wordy and, dare I say, sentimental), it truly does justice to the extraordinary life that this woman has lived, and is living. If any of you out there are familiar with Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, you might have a similar experience to mine: as I was reading I kept identifying bits and pieces of the book and song that matched up, and I was amused.
Barbara Walters has pretty much lived the last 50+ years of notable American and world history. For someone like myself, who often struggled with history classes in the traditional academic setting, this is a much more accessible and interesting way to gain a greater understanding of "what really happened."
It does seem to me that I've been leaning rather strongly towards nonfiction of late. I go through phases when all I want to read is fiction, and then suddenly nothing in that particular realm interests me in the least; it's as though the oasis had dried up without warning, and all that was left to browse were stones and dry leaves and nothing very interesting at all.
At that point I'm left wandering my usual alternative-reading haunts: biography and science. For me, science is a subject that, in various ways, I clearly did well at in school but once things got to a certain technical level (chemistry, physics) I generally became daunted by the math involved and gave up. So occasionally I'll stumble through those shelves and find something that I can relate to.
This coming week, however, I will allow myself to indulge in what I might normally dismiss as fluff. Honestly, in my most humble, bookwench-y opinion, there's a lot of fluff out there. A great deal of it is not, as they say, relevant to my interests. But Janet Evanovich has a new Stephanie Plum book, Fearless Fourteen, and as I got sucked into that series years ago by my best friend and fellow book-a-holic, I'll give this one a go as I do with each of Evanovich's yearly efforts.
Last year's title, Lean Mean Thirteen, actually made me wonder when the series was finally going to end, because if that was the best the author could do after all that time, surely it was time to call it quits. I know that, generally speaking, all the books have a similar scheme: Plum is desperate, Plum sludges through job, flirts with Ranger, hijinks with Lula and Grandma, gets into a situation more serious than she can handle, calls Joe, blows up a few cars, is rescued, spends a night with Morelli and his dog, eats dinner with parents and newlywed sister (and children), and eventually manages to save the day despite an unbelievable number of fumbles, and all with a spectacular amount of innuendo and humor. Usually these machinations are at least entertaining enough to be worth an hour of so of my time. Last time was the first time I can really say I felt disappointed by the end of the book.
However, I've had a sneak peek at the first few pages of Fourteen, and it seems to be much more promising. So I'm looking forward to that.
I'm also working on another memoir, Bar Flower, that is quite engrossing and will likely merit a post of its own once I finish.
For now, however, it's just about that time where I scuttle off to live amongst the tomes for an hour or eight.
Ta!
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