Book No. 29: Fly Away Home

My latest book was Fly Away Home, by Jennifer Weiner.

I love Jennifer Weiner's books.  I love them, and I think I would love Jennifer herself if only she would move to Idaho so we could be friends... 

Okay, just kidding.  I am (pretty much) not a stalker.  So anyway, Fly Away Home.   I liked it a lot.   The main story is about what happens when a famous husband cheats, and the repercussions it has on his wife and daughters.  The pain, the recovery, the decisions the women must make.  What is the "right" or "best" thing to do when your husband has cheated?  What if that husband is a famous politician? 

The book also tells the stories of the daughters' own lives -- one, a successful doctor, is having an affair, and the other, a recovering addict, finds she is accidentally pregnant.  I really enjoyed how complex these characters all were.  No one situation was cut and dried. 

Since I recently read Emily Giffin's Heart of the Matter, which also told a story of a complicated infidelity, I couldn't help but compare the two.  Fly Away Home hit the mark better (for me, anyway) -- I did care about these characters and what choices they would make, whereas I just did not find the characters in Giffin's novel to be appealing.

 

So it was a good one.  I'll read anything Jennifer Weiner writes.

Here's a nice interview with the author regarding the book (Elle.com, June 2010).

easy breezy

Girly-girl books this week: The Real Real by Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin (authors of The Nanny Diaries) and Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner.

The Real Real: What is it with me and YA books? I might be immature. Never said I wasn't. So the premise of this book is this: A music TV channel ("XTV") sets its sights on a high school in the Hamptons as the focus of a reality series called The Real Hampton Beach - a la Laguna Beach, The Hills, etc. Shows I love, so this is why I was drawn to this book. Our heroine, Jesse, is not part of the in crowd, but is chosen to be a focus character nonetheless. How she deals with the popularity, the jealousy of her her best friend, the powers that be at the TV station - this makes up our story. It's cute - a nice summer read for a teenage girl. Or a nice holiday week read for a 40-year old.

P.S. Did you know that Kraus and McLaughlin's Nanny Returns just came out this month?

Best Friends Forever: I'm a fan of Jennifer Weiner. I think I've read all of her books at this point -- enjoying some more than others, naturally, but I am always willing to pick up something she's written. This one is a little bit Thelma and Louise -- two childhood friends who were torn apart but who reconnect at their high school reunion and set off to wreak revenge on someone who wronged them. It's more complicated than that -- messed-up families play a part in the story -- but I don't want to retall the whole story here...

Which brings me to this realization: I am pretty much just logging what I read these days. I don't know if I'm tired, or just don't have time or what, but I am at a point where I am not spending the effort to dissect what I'm reading. Which is fine with me. But it makes me think maybe it's time for another 50 Book Challenge! I think that's what I'll do, beginning in 2010 - since I'm spending more time reading than writing about the books, I might as well just go with it - and spend more time reading and just log what I've read.

50 Book Challenge is back!

My Top Nine Chick Lit Novels

All right, then. Since we’ve established that I cannot resist the siren call of the girly novel, no matter how much I pretend to disdain them, then I might as well face up to facts and just sing their praises already. (More analysis/defense after the list.) Here, then, are my ten favorite chick lit novels (not including books by Jane Austen, George Eliot or the Brontes, which are, when you get down to it, entertaining books about single women and social mores …). In no particular order:

1. Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding. This isn’t necessarily my favorite on this list, but I liked it, and as it is widely (though, some will argue, erroneously) considered to be the seminal work of the chick lit genre as it exists today, it stands to reason that it should occupy #1 on this list.
   


2. Watermelon, by Marian Keyes. Watermelon actually came out a year before Bridget, so maybe this should be tied for #1, actually... This is, I believe, the first chick lit book to which I succumbed. Claire, our heroine, gets dumped by her husband as she lies in the hospital, giving birth to their first daughter.
   
   
   
3. 3. Something Borrowed, by Emily Giffin. Despite the author's tendency to malign Blue Devils and pump it up for Wake Forest... ad nauseum... in every book she writes... she gets my vote. I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing, really.
   



4. Good In Bed, by Jennifer Weiner. I already wrote about this book... just this week. But this one makes the list because it made me cry.
   
   
5. Welcome to My Planet: Where English is Sometimes Spoken, by Shannon Olson. I already wrote about this one, too, about a hundred years ago.
   


6. The entire Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. Evanovich has scads of dedicated fans. Our girl Stephanie is an unlikely bounty hunter with big hair and a pet hamster. She juggles a couple of hot men while conducting her bounty-hunting activities, which are more often than not slapsticky antics involving a host of goofball characters. These books are actually really fun. Light, funny, silly. Ms. Evanovich is perhaps the godmother of what has come to be known as the “tart noir” genre (chick lit mysteries). Start with One for the Money.
   


7. As long as we’re including entire series, then let’s add the Gossip Girl series by Cecily Von Ziegesar. I know these are ostensibly for teenagers, but they are hard to put down. I have only read a couple of them, and I might just have Gossip Girl on the brain due to my love for the TV show (the pretty, pretty people! the bright and shiny clothes!), but I think these books are fun and pop-culturally significant, so they make my list.



8. The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. This book was so commercially successful that the first-time authors were given a heady $3 million advance for their second book, Citizen Girl. Which they reportedly had to return, when Citizen Girl turned out to be a dud.
   


9. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger. Being an assistant is hard.

Coming up with a Top Ten list is also hard (which is why I stopped at nine.)

So, I’ve been thinking. What I like about these books, I think, is that the authors put their characters through (mostly) realistic situations, situations that a lot of women can relate to. I think this is what draws women in. Stories about dating, weight loss/gain, pregnancy issues, family pressures, embarrassing moments, laughing with friends – these are all things I easily identify with. And these are not necessarily frivolous things: Many traumatic issues (infidelity, family, anxiety, loss of jobs/boyfriends/family members) are handled in the stories, but handled with some humor. They are, in general, upbeat – not altogether emotionally draining. It’s not that the characters are silly, really. Just because there’s a hole in the ozone layer, doesn’t mean a woman can’t also be sad about - say - breaking off her engagement, you know? I can be excited about a new president and new shoes.

Let’s consider the demographic. The past decade or so has shown that there are more single women, making more money, living on their own, than ever before. So it stands to reason that there would be a genre of literature reflecting that trend. Look at Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and The City (the latter of which, of course, was a book to begin with). All wildly popular during this era, and all exhibit chick lit characteristics: Single people in urban settings, often relying on a tribe of friends rather than family members, dealing with real life issues with humor.

So I have decided I stand in defense of the genre. Books don’t have to be depressing to be good. Why am I being so defensive?

Any other candidates?

Books in Clumps: Jennifer Weiner

I think I am the last lady in the world to have finally gotten around to reading Jennifer Weiner’s Good In Bed. Even though I heard lots of good things about it, I still resisted. Was it the title? Was it that I had an issue with “big girl lit” – which I assumed might be demeaning to larger women in some way? I don’t know. At any rate, I finally picked it up a couple of months ago, and I am so glad I did. Our girl Cannie has a “traditional build,” sure, and her body issues played a role in the story. But the book was not preachy, or overbearing, and the book was not about being plus-sized, really. She is just a realistic girl with realistic problems. The story moved along well and I cried at the end.

Cannie stuck with me, and I liked the book so much that I immediately gobbled up copies of her other books (as is my wont): Little Earthquakes, Certain Girls, and Goodnight Nobody. Then I listened to In Her Shoes during a drive.

Good In Bed is my favorite out of the lot, but Little Earthquakes was a close second. It’s about four young mothers, and even though I am not a young mother (and it has been made clear to me by plenty of people that I have no right whatsoever to comment on anything having to do with children or parenting, despite the fact that I do not live in a cave and certainly have my opinions on a variety of things just as, I’m sure, everyone else in the world has their own opinions on plenty of things that they have not personally experienced but WHATEVER) it was still engrossing and the characters were really captivating. Certain Girls is a continuation of Cannie’s story that, in my opinion, did not do justice to her appearance in Good In Bed. She didn’t even seem like the same woman, really.

So if you’re to pick up one Jennifer Weiner book, make it Good In Bed. Here's the author's blog. She's pretty clever. She describes how, upon checking in for a triathlon and looking around at her fellow competitors, some look like "strips of beef jerky in Lycra unitards." Heh.