Missmeganbunny’s Weblog

Hello, blog. I apologize for my long absense. I’ve had a lot of insanity going on in my personal life for the last few months, and haven’t really been able to focus on reading and writing as much as I’d like.

In my time away, however, I’ve finished two noteworthy books that I will unfortunately NOT be writing detailed reviews on. I’ll write brief blurbs on each here.

The Oral Biography Of Rant Casey – Chuck Palahniuk ***1/2

This book took me a while to get into. It’s futuristic-ness was kind of hard for me to understand, but once I finally “got” what was going on, I thought it was pretty amazing. The story revolved around rabies, time travel, immortality, and REality. I’m sure there was a much deeper meaning than that which I ascertained, but I just read the book to take my mind off of the crap that’s going on in my life (it worked). I loved the character of Echo Lawerence. That’s all I have to say.

Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls – Danielle Wood ****1/2

This book was very enjoyable to read. I consists of short stories written mostly in first person, all dealing with life issues. The about truth, Elephantiasis, is about an obese woman who’s family and friends have somehow gotten the misconception that she loves elephants. They constantly buy her elephant-themed gifts, and she always feigns a smile and tries to be polite despite her inner disdain for the things. The story almost made me cry… which makes it an excellent piece of writing in my book!

I’ll be working on reading more books and actually paying attention to them in the near future, as my personal issues are starting to finally resolve.

I got this book at the library. The sticker on the side, which aids in shelving, I suppose, says “MOO”. I thought that was kind of humorous.

Just like the book. Okay, my writing brain is REALLY not awake right now, but I don’t want to forget what I read. It was about two central characters, Benna and Gerard. It had three mini-stories inside it. They all were about Benna and Gerard, but in different life-scenarios. One had them married, another had them dating, and the last had them as best friends. The latter was my favorite of all three stories.

I don’t understand the significance of the three different-but-the-same stories, but I’m sure there IS major significance there. I just enjoyed the hell out of the book. It was laugh-out-loud funny, literally. Usually when I’m reading something funny, the little voice inside my brain laughs, but I don’t actually physically LAUGH. You know what I mean? But while reading this book, I really did laugh aloud. It was embarrassing. Laying in bed next to my husband, who’s rambling on about something that happened at work, then suddenly I just erupt into laughter. He thinks I’m laughing at what he says… “I know, right?” the whole shebang. So READ THIS BOOK ALONE.

I’m not going to go into the plot, because it had many different plots. This is one of those books that left me feeling changed. I probably won’t remember the story itself in a couple of weeks, but I’ll still feel different than I did before I read the book. It got me thinking in a slightly different groove. Using different word patterns. Envisioning myself single. Yikes!

Anagrams was a great read!

The book I’m reviewing today is called Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. Anne is an author who has published some books of both fiction and non-fiction, including titles such as Hard Laughter (1980), and Operating Instructions: A Journal Of My Son’s First Year (1993). She’s also written three books about her Christian faith. She’s known, however, to be slightly controversial in the Christian sector. I mean, she uses swear words, for God’s sake. She’s hardly a “conventional Christian”. I think that’s why I like her so much. I don’t see myself getting interested enough in Christianity to pick up one of her three books on faith any time too soon, as I’m sort of on a migration AWAY from it presently. Albeit, she has piqued my interest because of her openness to talk about alcoholism and drug abuse in a very candid, down-to-earth way. No holier-than-thou here.

But I’ve gone entirely off topic, because Bird By Birdis NOT about Christianity or drinking. It’s a book on writing. I picked it up almost simultaneously with my decision to participate in Nanowrimo this year, and honestly I’m not sure which decision came first (reading her book, or deciding to write a novel). They seemed to happen at the same time. And reading this book gave me a full-speed kick in the pants towards getting serious about writing again. It wasn’t about the nitty-gritty, grammatical and phonetic elements of writing. It was more like a book full of inspiration to just write.

In Bird By Bird, Lamott uses a lot of personal anecdotes that really disclose who she is as a person to readers. I think that’s what makes the book so inspiring. She writes a lot about her writing workshops that she teaches, and the silliness of the students involved. She points out the humor in how fastidiously her students subscribe to the idea of being published as a simple, fill-out-the-paperwork or get-good-connections endeavor. She puts heavy emphasis on writing for your OWN personal fulfillment, and she suggests that publishing be made a secondary (or even lesser) goal. I think this is great advice for writers. I am not published, and have never produced anything worth publishing. I don’t ever assume I’ll be published. But if I write a book… I will be so proud of myself, and that’s all that matters. The book Bird By Bird affirmed that attitude for me tenfold.

This book will give you great advice about how to get started in writing. Lamott basically says just GO. Do it badly, just DO it, and go back later to make it good. She came up with the term “shitty first drafts”, which are mentioned tons of times in this book. She believes that it is crucial to write shitty first drafts as a beginning to any writing assignment or project. It may indeed be shitty, but it’s the diamond extracted from the earth. With some polishing, it will be beautiful. I think that many people attempt to write things once and expect them to be good enough for publishing… or even good enough to meet their own expectations. And the writings aren’t good enough. And then people give up.

I’d recommend Bird By Bird to anyone who wants to get serious about writing, but needs some inspiration to get moving. Or to anyone who’s made lots of attempts to write something, but they always seem to fail. This isn’t a guide to getting published, or a handbook to writing grammatically correct material. It’s a book about the writer’s PROCESS. And that’ s one of the most important things you should read about, as a writer.

Lamott tells us not to ever think of what we write the first time we sit down and work on something as the product. This is advice I will cherish forever.

 My rating: ***** 1/2!
I just finished reading Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. This fictional story was about 500 pages long, and I swear, something important happened on each and every page. I’m not even going to get into the story itself… I’d have to take hours to give an in-depth story summary as I have with some of the other books I’ve reviewed here. Plus, it had a huge element of suspense that I wouldn’t want to ruin for any potential readers.

I’ll tell you this much: it seemed to deal with just about every conceivable topic of social deviancy and controversy. We’re talking incest, pedophilia, rape, prostitution, violence, crime, religion, superstition… and by “controversies” I mean interracial relationships and same sex relationships. Which, might I add, are two of my favorite topics to read about. The best part of all was that it took place in a historical setting. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the early part of the 1900s. That’s not a place and time you read about every day. The prose was beautiful. Haunting, even.

I love it when the characters I’m getting to know in a story automatically assign themselves to faces of people I know. When I get such a strong sense of the character’s personality, that I start to subconsciously form a picture of a familiar person in my life with similar personality traits. That happened immediately with this book. All of the characters were so painfully realistic, my brain selected faces without even consulting me. I can boldly and certainly say that MacDonald has crafted the most believable and deep characters I have EVER met in a story, in any book, any time.

The plot was heart-quickening. Sadly, I decided to read this book while on vacation at the beach, and I’ll have to admit that I don’t remember much about the vacation itself. The plot of this story was loud enough to block out crashing waves, my husband’s voice and even my own thoughts. That says a lot. If you are a fan of unexpected twists… mind-fuckery as I like to call it, you will be feasting royally on this one.

The setting and descriptions thereof caused me to acquire goosebumps, many times. I could picture it all so vividly, I could smell the Lebanese food cooking and hear Kathleen’s voice lessons. It made me feel more present in MacDonald’s world of Cape Breton and the Piper family than I’ve felt in my own family in a long time.

Lastly, the “sexual surprise” near the end left me reeling, shocked and strangely entranced.

This book will shock you. That’s my thesis statement… my summarizing sentence. Whatever. It was beautiful, haunting, and enthralling. Read it. The End.

I pretty much just closed the book Self-Help by author Lorrie Moore. Funny story there… I had actually begun reading it a few weeks ago, but was so bored by the first short story (entitled How To Be An Other Woman) that I decided to ditch it and start on my next book. Which happened to be the last book I reviewed here in my blog. Ironically, some of the same subject matter that had bored me in Self-Help immediately re-appeared in Before I Wake. The books are written by totally different authors. Anywho, after I finished my last book, I decided to try Self-Help once more, to see if it would redeem itself to me. And guess what? It did.

Self-Help is a short story collection written by Lorrie Moore. After reading it, I just had to read up on her to find out who she is. Turns out, she’s won quite a few short fiction awards and has a couple of other books out that I’d like to read. Self-Help came out in 1985, so it’s early stuff for her. Apparently, almost all the the stories come from her master’s thesis at Cornell.

I was thrown off at first by the voice of the stories. Almost all of them seem to be written in… second person? It reads, obviously, like a twisted self-help book. Take How To Be An Other Woman, for example. Moore tells us what to do in conducting an affair, in a darkly witty way. Several of the stories were concerning terminal illness, and those that were not were about unfaithfulness in a relationship. It’s black comedy, really.

I really enjoyed the story To Fill. It’s about an overweight woman who is pilfering money from her job, and really doesn’t seem to care if she gets caught. She visits her senile mother in the hospital often and brings her presents each time. The story unfolds as she realizes her husband is cheating on her again, after he had been found out the year before and swore he’d change. Then, her pilfering at work gets brought to light, and she is fired. A few shocking and darkly funny things happen. Yada yada.

The real charm in this book, to me, was the voice. Like it was being read aloud to me by a monotonous, but strangely comforting voice. It did the trick of opening up my mind, and left me where any good piece of reading material should leave me– yearning for more.

Before I Wake is a story about a couple who have a baby girl after years of saying “sure, we want kids… but just not now“. The story starts when Simon and Karen Barrett’s daughter, Sherilyn (Sherry, for short) is three years old. The book opens with the dreadful scene of Karen taking her daughter on a walk to the mall. They cross what seems to be a clear street, when an unseen semi-truck hits the little girl. After a long, agonizing hospital stay, the doctor informs the Barretts that their daughter is confirmed to be “brain-dead”. The Barretts agree to have the plug pulled, and just as their daughter slips into the unknown, she comes back. Well, physically, that is. She begins respiration on her own, and becomes physically self-sustained. However, her brain function does not return.

Simon Barrett is having an affair with a lady named Mary. Shortly after Sherry returns home, Simon tells his wife about the affair. Karen insists Simon leave, and she assumes the responsibility of caring for Sherry, along with a staff of nurses.

One of the nurses notices that her arthritis has virtually disappeared. She suspects that Sherry may have had something to do with it. She calls her sister, who is dying of cancer, and arranges for her to come and secretly put Sherry’s suspected powers of healing to the test. Sherry’s nurse lays the little girls hand on her sisters breast. Within a few days, the cancer is declared in remission. Word starts to get around, and it seems that everyone but the Barretts know about little Sherry’s “powers”.

An article is printed in the newspaper about it, and people begin to come from near and far to be healed by Sherry. Simon realizes he has to step out of his whirlwind affair and be present for his wife and daughter. Together, the Barretts decide to allow the sick and injured people to come in a see their daughter. They make it clear that they are giving no guarantees, but they just can’t cold-heartedly turn all of these believers away. Karen feels that if there were any remote possibility in the world that her own daughter might be healed, she would certainly give it a try, no matter how crazy it seemed. So, the Barretts begin showing people in, one at a time, to see their little girl.

The family and the people who had come to be healed have to face a very ominous man and his followers who are protesting what is happening. They believe that Sherry is a false prophet, and that by “clearing the path for His return”, they are doing the work of God. The Barretts continually dodge dangerous situations posed by this group. The police have decided not to come to the family’s aid because of a mix-up of personal interests. The group of protesters almost claim Sherry forever, until the biggest miracle of all happens.

Okay– now for the good part… my opinion of this book. From the first page, I was hooked. Having just recently attended the funeral of a three year old boy, and seeing the grief of parents mourning a child taken too soon, the depiction of the Barrett’s devastation was crystal clear. I don’t usually cry when reading fiction, but I must say that this book nearly brought tears to my eyes a few times, and certainly did linger in my mind over the entire course of the 2 days it took me to finish it. It truely was, as the Edmonton Journal said, “One of those books you just don’t want to put down until you’ve read to the last page”.

Equally intense as the parts about Sherry was the plot of Simon and Karen’s relationship. In that sense, it did have a happy twist at the end. I wouldn’t call it a “happy ending”. I found myself wanting to plunge myself into the story and take those two and tie them together. It felt like they were real people, and everyone but them knew that they were absolutely destined to be together.

This book got me thinking about something I’ve never considered before. You often hear about couples separating after the loss of a child, and I’ve always wondered “why? It seems like they’d need each other more than ever at a time like that”. While reading this story, I visualized it happening to my husband and me, and I realized how hard it would be to grieve alongside of someone else. How everything they would do would seem wrong, not good enough, insensitive. What would seem like your weakest, most vulnerable point is actually your strongest, because you are holding on with a death grip to the child’s memory, and to not letting it go. Like a mother bear who’s cub has been stolen, you’d be pumped with adrenaline, waiting for someone to try to take the memory away.

I just finished reading We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is an author I came to know through her collections of scary stories (Haunted: Tales Of The Grotesque and The Collector Of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque, to be exact). I’ve always enjoyed her way of writing of people’s thoughts and feelings as if they were actual literal events. While her story collections were what some would call disappointing, I found her book Beasts (2002) to be quite exhilarating (sure wish I’d been writing about the books I was reading back then, because sadly enough I don’t really remember anything about the story itself).

After reading We Were The Mulvaneys, I have realized that Oates’s claim to fame lies not in the hit-or-miss short story collections, but in this novel (and probably other novels I have yet to read). This 454-page book is capable of evoking such a spectrum of feelings in the reader– it’s as if Oates were on remote access to my brain while I was reading. A few words can be ultimately used to categorize the book — “family”, “rape”, “a coming undone”… but the book was much more than the plot alone.

The plot, ah, yes. The story is about Michael Sr. and Corrine Mulvaney, a farm family living in the Chautauqua Valley area of New York. They have four children — Michael Jr., Patrick, Marianne and the youngest son, Judd (who is the supposedly unbiased and quite omnipresent voice of the story). The Mulvaneys seem to have a very beautiful, secluded life that others in their community may be envious of. They run a very large farm, living from the proceeds of Michael Sr.’s prosperous roofing company. They are what you might call “animal enthusiasts”– having not only an impressive collection of farm animals, but also many beloved pets of whom each Mulvaney has found a favorite. The Mulvaneys seem to be the picture of familial closeness and stability, until one fateful night when sweet, naive Marianne goes to her prom and is raped by a local teenage boy. She suffers through several agonizing days in secrecy and comes to the conclusion that she was very deserving of the assault. When the truth is revealed to Corrine, all hell breaks loose. Michael Sr. has an appetite for revenge, but Marianne remains stubbornly self-blaming to the point that causes her to be unable to testify against the perpetrator of the assault. With no option for legal recourse, Marianne’s father begins down a fast decline of mental soundness and stability. He decides that he cannot bear to see his daughter anymore, and Corrine agrees to send Marianne away to a distant relative for what turns out to be twelve long years.

In the meantime, Marianne’s older brother Patrick is also coming to know himself. He develops a passion, bordering obsession, with science, and succeeds in his studies. He graduates valedictorian and goes on to more success at Cornell University. In his deep thoughts about mankind and the way the world works, he comes to the conclusion that justice must be executed manually, and that man cannot rely of social structures to exact that justice. He decides to take matters of avenging the fallen Mulvaney family unit into his own hands, involving his younger brother Judd as something of an accessory to a major crime– or, almost.

The plot speeds up towards the end. I won’t give the ending away, but it really is sad. We get to watch each of the Mulvaneys, as they knew themselves, die slow and painful deaths, some in a literal sense. The family structure never goes back to the way it was, which really borders on cruelty to the reader, since we got to know the characters in such depth earlier on in the story.

The story itself was not what I’d call shocking, as there was little you couldn’t already see coming. However, like I’ve said, the story itself almost isn’t quite as important as the characters. The family unit. Like watching a beautiful, healthy child be stricken with a terminal illness and suffer out the rest of his pain-filled days… that’s what reading this book felt like.

On a personal note, I have to say that this story touched me on many levels. Corrine Mulvaney reminded me so much of a strange blend of my own mother and myself, as well as exemplified many qualities I would like to possess when I am a mother someday. She is chipper, strong and holds together the family with her ever-laughing, ever-whistling demeanor. Even though the children sometimes felt embarrassed of the way their mother was, she really was what kept them forward-moving. She was an immense strength, even when no one else was strong. She stayed strong and positive, even in the end when her entire life was falling apart. Some might call this blindness, craziness, or religious blind-craziness, but I call it strength. Now, Corrine had a major fault — she let her children slip away because she truly loved her husband more than she loved her children, as hard as that is to imagine. This was a pact they made with eachother before they even had children, and Corrine Mulvaney stayed true to it. This was imminently the downfall of the family unit, because her husband asked of her what no husband and father should ask of his wife and the mother of his offspring: to literally choose him over the children. I think that if Corrine could have adapted her promise to love her husband most to somehow not let it mean losing the children, she would have been a happier woman and would have had a happier family. But, alas, we all have our fatal flaws.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to get back in touch with their memories of family. Be warned, however… reading We Were The Mulvaneys WILL cause you to cry, a lot, and also to start thinking about owning a farm… possibly even simultaneously!

Happy Reading!

Mrs. B