1. I cannot keep Peter Carey and Peter Ackroyd straight in my head. Both of them write books that sound like I would love them, and then I never love them. So I am doing like Mother Jaguar. I graciously wave my tail, and I shall call it Peter Carkroyd. And I shall leave it alone.

2. Can’t not mention this when talking about Peter Carkroyd because it is horrifying. Peter Carkroyd is also notable for writing the book Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes. The film is narrated by someone who calls Oscar “my grandfather”, so all the way through the movie you assume that awkward Cate Blanchett and awkward Ralph Fiennes are eventually going to get together, to produce the father of the narrating grandchild. But does that happen? NO! Awkward Ralph Fiennes gets very ill taking a church-on-a-raft to the Amazon or the Australian outback or someplace and finally flops limply and near death into a settlement, and a woman in the settlement is like “Oh, poor dear, I will take care of him,” and he’s all “I’m near death” and she takes him home and rapes his semiconscious self and the next morning he goes into the church-on-a-raft to pray for forgiveness for seducing the woman (this takes place way back in the day before they knew about sex), and the church-on-a-raft sinks and he drowns. And then the end of the movie is, like, the narrator turns out to be this old guy telling this story to his own granddaughter, who is, like, ten years old. Not cool, Peter Carkroyd and assorted film people. Not cool. And scarred me and Social Sister for life.

3. Charles and Mary Lamb, the fictionalized subjects of The Lambs of London, are people who just don’t interest me. I don’t know why. Mary Lamb went crazy and stabbed her mother in the throat, and Charles Lamb had to look after her for the rest of his life. I love craziness, and I love devoted brothers. Why I wouldn’t be interested in a) them or b) a novel about them is beyond me. But it’s true. I don’t care about Charles and Mary Lamb. I just don’t.

4. The other historical storyline in The Lambs of London is about William Henry Ireland, the famous Shakespeare forger who forged a ton of documents in Shakespeare’s hand and eventually got caught. I actually am interested in this, but Peter Carkroyd dealt with it so boringly and with so little insight or novelty that by the end of the book I was actually less interested in William Henry Ireland than I was when I started.

5. Peter m.f. Carkroyd. Why do we even let you write books?

I’m concerned that preface comes too close to being spoilery, but never mind. If you’re worried about spoilers, just stop reading this review now and give it a few months before you decide to read the first of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford mysteries.

That’s right! The very first! Now, I have had some success with Barbara Vine (though not infallible success), and have liked Ruth Rendell less, in spite of their being the same person. But I thought I’d read the first Wexford book and see what I made of it. From Doon with Death is about a poor dull woman called Mrs. Parsons who gets murdered in a forest. Pretty standard mystery fare, including the resolution, though apparently the resolution was Very Shocking at the time. It’s all, you know, fine. It isn’t as brilliant as A Dark-Adapted Eye, for example, but it’s a solid detective murder mystery and I enjoyed it.

Damned with faint praise? Yes, but as I say, not altogether Ruth Rendell’s fault. You’ll know what I mean if you read it.

Here’s the big thing that came out of my reading this book: The afterword in the edition I read discusses Rendell’s attitude toward the Shocking Content and how it is in line with what was believed to be Right and True at the time the book was written. It then says that a read-through of Rendell’s oeuvre is like reading a social history of England from 1964 to the present. Y’all, I love a Project. I love reading things in chronological order from the beginning. Those are things I already love. When someone frames it as being of wider sociological interest to do the exact thing I already love, you know I cannot resist. Hence I will be reading all of Ruth Rendell’s books in order from the beginning, not counting short stories, to the extent that my library access permits me. Project.

Gypsy Gypsy is about this girl called Henrietta who lives with her mean aunt Barbe. Yes, the lady’s name is Barbe, and she’s very sarcastic to everybody. It is a trifle on the nose, and I’d like to make some excuse for Rumer Godden like she was only 33 when this book was published, but you know what, Alexander had conquered the whole Mediterranean by the time he was 33, so no pass for Rumer Godden! Henrietta has a boyfriend but inexplicably refuses to marry him because she — I don’t know why, this is never explained. I guess she isn’t yet ready to leave her life of weird, awkward servitude to her amoral aunt Barbe. Aunt Barbe owns a fancy mansion and all the peasant folk hate her. You keep thinking they’re going to rebel against her and come raid the mansion Beauty and the Beast style, but they never do and this plot point doesn’t really come to anything.

Aunt Barbe is a sour old cow, and one day over dinner she tells Henrietta how in the olden days they thought that having sex with a virgin would cure you of diseases, and Barbe has the brilliant idea that maybe you could apply this same basic principle to a diseased soul. She figures if she can corrupt a purely innocent soul, she’ll be clean again, instead of being a miserable bitch that everyone hates. So she starts being really nice to this gypsy family that she lets move onto her land, and everyone’s like, “Hey, no, don’t invite gypsies here, they’re bad news!” Aunt Barbe gives the gypsy kids candy and plays stupid games with them, but because she’s doing this from a malicious motive, it ends up ruining their lives. Henrietta keeps fluttering about going “They were happy before! Stop giving them candy!” but nobody listens to Henrietta because she’s a cipher of fluttery nothing. Then Aunt Barbe shames the gypsy father about his poverty, and he stabs Aunt Barbe’s old Nanny in the neck (yeah, she still has a Nanny. I know, right?), but they all work really hard to get him off the murder charge. Nobody ever hesitates about helping a guy who stabbed an old lady in the neck get off a murder charge. He gets convicted of a lesser charge, and everyone’s unhappy about everything. The end.

I will start by saying, because I love Rumer Godden and I want you to think well of her, that she wrote a book called The Diddakoi later in her life, about a little gypsy orphan girl. The Diddakoi is pretty merciless to the characters who are prejudiced against gypsies. So I know that Rumer Godden does not really think that gypsies are a) pure innocent souls in the wilderness of the world or b) dirty scum of the earth thieves.

Next I will say that when Rumer Godden got the idea for a book about a woman who tries the spiritual version of deflowering a virgin to get rid of disease, Oscar Wilde stood on the edge of heaven and screamed and lamented for two straight years because he had not thought of it first. This is such an Oscar Wilde idea in a Rumer Godden book, and that — though I love them both dearly — is not a recipe for success. I mean Aunt Barbe is basically a less lazy, female Sir Henry Wotton. Oscar Wilde would have done this book much better than Rumer Godden, but he didn’t have the chance because he died at forty-six and never was able to have this idea and write it into a book that would have been much better that Rumer Godden’s rotten book.

And finally, I will say what I was thinking this whole book long, which is, What the hell, Rumer Godden?

Never read Gypsy Gypsy. It’s awful, and it doesn’t even have the compensatory positive of being written in that excellent, distinctive style that Rumer Godden has. Traces of her style are visible, but they’re hidden behind a black cloud of smoggy awfulness.

A Single Man is about a British literature professor called George, who recently lost his partner, Jim. George is lonely and isolated, his primary source of company a British woman called Charlotte whose husband left her for another woman. He thinks a lot and drinks and talks to his students at the California university where he teaches, and at the end (spoilers!) he dies.

If this synopsis sounds somewhat tart, it’s because I wanted Christopher Isherwood to blow my mind, and he did not. He has such a cool name! I judge last names by whether I would change my last name to it if I were engaged to a guy with that last name; and I would totally be willing to be Jenny Isherwood. Isherwood! It’s fun to say. And Christopher is one of my favorite names for a boy (St. Christopher was not real, but I still sometimes say a prayer to him for safe travels). Plus, you know, Christopher Isherwood, pioneering gay writer! I wanted to be on board that train.

Alas, I am not on board the train. The writing in A Single Man felt fussy, and although I liked George, I wasn’t interested in anything he was doing (with one exception, about which more in a second). If I’m honest, I do not care for slice-of-life stories. Stories are good for the way they impose order on the disorder of real life! Down with slice-of-life stories! Down with them I say! (I know, right, I have such a future as a demagogue like Demosthenes or similar.)

The one section of the book that leapt vividly off the page for me — weirdly! — was the sequence where George is teaching his class. I loved the way Isherwood described the dynamic between George and his students, the way he feels about individual students, the conversations they have, the answers they offer. I could have read an entire book about George teaching his English class.

Identifying this as my favorite scene reminded me of what a fan I am of seeing things in process. I like watching people work things out and come to a better understanding of what they’re working with. Something like the documentary Discovering Hamlet, where you see Derek Jacobi directing Branagh in Hamlet, is fascinating to me, I’d watch a hundred documentaries of that sort. Ditto every discussion scene in Reading Lolita in Tehran. The conclusions don’t have to be groundbreaking (they don’t even have to reach a conclusion!) but I like watching people on their way to discovering something about a text.

Apropos of that, Al Pacino is making a documentary about putting on a play of Salome. I am stupid excited about this and cannot wait for it to show up in New York at Film Forum or BAM or whatever. One of the everyday benefits of New York that I did not expect to enjoy so much is that all the movies come here. All the movies. If I see a preview of a movie that looks interesting, I don’t have to fret over whether I’ll be able to see it. It’s definitely coming here and I can definitely see it if I want to. That is rather great.

Any huge fans of Christopher Isherwood who’d like to tell me what to read that might make me love him after all?

Be that as it may, I am going to go ahead and recommend The Unwritten in the strongest possible terms to you. I reviewed the first volume with great enthusiasm and have been silent on the topic of The Unwritten since then. I would like, at this juncture, having just read the fourth volume, to tell you all that regardless of what sort of endgame Mike Carey has in mind for this series — and sometimes I entertain doubts that he has an endgame — the existing volumes are marvelously fun and well worth reading. Indeed, and this is a pretty serious statement from a girl who lives in a small New York apartment and tries to think about downsizing rather than upsizing, I am considering buying the existing Unwritten volumes even though that would mean I’d have to buy all the subsequent others in order to have a complete set.

(I would consider subscribing to it via HeavyInk again, but it turns out the president of HeavyInk is a crazy asshole. So I am not using HeavyInk anymore.)

The Unwritten is a story about stories, my fave. It features a Secret Cabal. It interrupts your regularly scheduled plot developments to give you a story about Oscar Wilde’s downfall. The protagonist has a complicated contentious relationship with his father. His ?love interest? is competent and clever but may also be all the way out of her entire damn mind. The fourth volume features a segment in which all the people who have ever been swallowed by a whale are hanging out in the whale’s stomach trying to get out (Jonah, Pinocchio, etc.). There’s an issue where we are discovering the backstory of one of the characters via a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure. It just — I don’t know! I don’t know! It is great!

You know what it’s like? It’s like that friend you had as a kid who would inspect all the available toys and come up with a crazy game to employ all of them to their maximum potential. The Unwritten is just like my friend Delaney when I was four (she told me I mustn’t say S E X because it was a dirty word, but she had the world’s best ever ideas for games). If you had that friend, you know how awesome it was to play with that friend, and then you know that you should go read The Unwritten.

Also, Happy New Year! I know this is not my first post of the New Year, but it’s the first post I’ve written in the New Year. I am excited about 2012!

Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi

Liked it a lot! I went to see Helen Oyeyemi talk at McNally Jackson, and she said that writing Mr. Fox was just fun, that she was just enjoying every minute of writing it. It shows when you’re reading the book. Mr. Fox plays with ideas of inspiration and violence against women and writing and imagination and Bluebeard stories. It’s a little weird and confusing but a lot funny and clever. Helen Oyeyemi remains one of my favorite young writers. As before I can’t wait to see what she does next. White Is for Witching remains my favorite of her four books because it involves a haunted house and I love a haunted house.

An Episode of Sparrows, Rumer Godden

Little street urchins try to make a garden in a Blitz-wrecked London. My mother loves this book, and I liked it, certainly, but it was awfully sad. The ending is hopeful, but not quite hopeful enough to make up for how extraordinarily sad it was in the meantime. Maybe upon successive rereadings I will love it better.

A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

My coworker said that Lorrie Moore writes the best women characters he’s ever encountered. Better than Alice Walker (he said). Y’all know it’s never a good idea to read a new book in a combative mood. I read A Gate at the Stairs with skeptical eyes but I have to say? I didn’t think the women characters were that great. They didn’t feel real at all, and neither did the men, and the whole thing just, eh, I didn’t like it. I thought it was going to focus more on the experience of being in college, so there was also that expectations gap that’s an enjoyment-killer.

Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar

Argh. I loved the idea of this book. There are 55 basic chapters and 99 “expendable” chapters. The author says you can read the 55 chapters in order and dispense with the 99, or you can read in an order he suggests that hopscotches between the regular chapters and the expendable ones. The idea is that you’ll have quite a different book if you read straight through, compared to if you jump around. Per usual, experimental fiction loses me by not giving a crap about plot. I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool it would be if a plot-minded author had done this same thing. If Barbara Vine had done it, say. If the expendable chapters had cast a new light on the events of the regular chapters. That would have been amazing. But that wasn’t what happened. I just got fed up and started wanting to punch the characters, and I couldn’t stop reading because I borrowed the book from a coworker (the one who thinks Lorrie Moore is better than Alice Walker OBVIOUS NONSENSE) and I wanted to be able to say something nice about it when I returned it because I hate it when someone asks to borrow a book from me and I lend them the book in spite of strong inclinations against lending my books and then they give it back without reading it. So I staggered on becoming more and more resentful, and by the second half of the book — which actually was significantly better and more interesting! — I was too fed up to enjoy the good things about the book.

And I hate reading books in translation. Sorry. I just do.

The end! Clean slate! Clean slate going into the New Year. I am going to be awesome at writing posts this year. YOU WILL SEE.

Basically Vera Brittain was living in England’s green and pleasant land, making plans to have hijinks at Oxford with her brother Edward and her new best friend Roland, and then all of a sudden it became World War I. Edward and Roland went off to war, and Vera wrote letters back and forth with them. She later became a war nurse and began corresponding with two other of Edward’s friends, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Nicholson. And (I say again) EVERYONE DIES. First Roland then Geoffrey then Victor then Edward, and poor Vera completely bereft.

In the interests of full disclosure, I didn’t finish the book. I couldn’t take reading the very end where poor Vera, who had already lost her fiance and her two dear close friends, lost her only brother as well. That is too sad. I have three sisters and cannot spare any of them, so I don’t even want to think about having one sibling and losing your only single sibling.

That said, I wasn’t quite as enthralled with this book as Ana was. She compared it to the Browning letters, which set the bar, like, WAY high. (I realize now I’ve never done a proper write-up of my passionate adoration of the Browning letters, but suffice it to say that if Robert Browning and Drew Brees got in a fight in heaven, I would assume Drew Brees was at fault. I promise I will reread the Browning letters in the New Year and rave about them to you then.) Vera and her correspondents were all good writers, and there were parts of the book that were fantastic, like the sections where poor Vera is trying to find out what happened to Roland exactly. But I would have liked a better sense of continuity.

And yes! I do indeed feel unbelievably churlish complaining about a lack of continuity in a book of letters by PEOPLE WHO ALL DIED. But that’s why I didn’t love Letters from a Lost Generation as much as Ana did, or as much as I love the Browning letters (which is infinity).

Random thing: Geoffrey Thurlow looks just like Ryan Gosling. Ryan Gosling would totally play him in the movie, amirite?

In that vein, I read Case Histories at last! Kate Atkinson! It finally happened! And shortly thereafter I read Stef Penney’s new book, The Invisible Ones, kindly provided to me by the lovely Lydia of Penguin, and y’all, these are not the same book but they felt like the same book. They’re both about divorced private investigators looking into The Case of the Missing Girl, they both (spoilers ahoy) have incest, they both feature the poor old private investigator being damaged in ways that they think relate to the case but they are not sure.

If I may be permitted a small rant: What on earth is this chokehold that divorced private investigators have on our collective unconscious? Why do they pop up over and over again, alternately still being in love with their ex-wives and calling them bitches? What is with that? I don’t even like private investigators! Let alone ones with weird, uncomfortable attitudes towards women, which is the case in Case Histories and The Invisible Ones. It wasn’t so much a problem in The Invisible Ones, but I wished someone had called Jackson Brodie on some of his bullshitty thoughts about the women in the case.

Both of these books were, you know, fine. I went through them quickly and enjoyed reading them, but once I got done, I didn’t think, God damn, I really must search out more books by these authors! I don’t mind about Stef Penney, but I know that people whose taste I respect, including Teresa and Ana, have really really enjoyed Kate Atkinson. Teresa and Ana, did you have the same reaction to Case Histories? Or do you consider Case Histories to be the pinnacle of Kate Atkinson’s achievements, in which case we possibly just have different opinions about her as an author?

P.S. Since writing the first draft of this post, I most gloriously took a massive ton of books to the Strand and sold them there. The bag o’ books was awkwardly huge and heavy for the subway, but I persisted. To avoid disappointment, I told myself to expect the Strand to accept fewer than half of them, and to receive maybe $5. Instead they took all but one and gave me $40. It was wonderful. It was both cleansing (my mother sensibly brainwashed Little Jenny into enjoying getting rid of stuff) and financially beneficial.

Is what I was saying throughout most of Habibi. I wanted to be saying what I was saying throughout most of Thompson’s previous book, Blankets, which was nothing actually because I was so breathless from the beauty of the story and the illustrations. I wanted that to be the case with Habibi, and occasionally it was, like when the characters were telling each other stories from Muslim traditions. Craig Thompson never didn’t succeed at making his stories beautiful. If he had stuck to this, we’d be having a very different review right now.

Let me back up. Described by Thompson as a fairy tale, Habibi is set in the fictional country of Wanatolia, an Arabian Nightsy place complete with harems and sultans and deserts. Dodola is raising a small boy named Zam, whom she rescued from slavers, on an abandoned ship in the middle of the desert. This is all very nice for Zam, up to a point (that point being the point at which he discovers how Dodola procures rations for them both), but then Dodola is taken away to be part of the sultan’s harem, and then a bunch of depressing stuff happens to both of them, and eventually (spoilers) they are reunited.

Basically, the book starts out lovely, but then gets super rapey. I do not like super rapey books. And here’s what it is: If your book is about real life, and you are careful, you can have a super rapey book. I might not want to read it, but I am far less likely to say “Come on dude” to you. If your book is a fairy tale and it’s super rapey, then that tends to fall into the realm of the unnecessary (as a rule! not always!). If you’re going to show sexual abuse, be prepared to deal with the emotional consequences for your characters. Don’t toss it in there because you need your characters to undergo many trials. When you do it that way, it makes me feel icky. It’s not that I’m trying to hide from the fact that rape is a real thing, it’s that I need books to treat it like a real thing, and give it the weight it deserves.

Leaving out the questionable way Thompson deals with rape in this book, the misery the characters go through was just too much misery. It was too much misery in too episodic and haphazard a way. They bounced from one miserable life to another miserable life, steady being miserable, that shorthand thing of making characters sympathetic by inflicting misery on them. There’s something to be said for putting your characters through hell, and I’m all for it, I really am, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as the next geeky girl, but you still have to make them recognizable people whose experiences change them. I didn’t feel anything for Dodola and Zam, I just sort of wanted the book to be over.

Boo. I was so excited for this book and I ended up not liking it at all and sort of wanting to give Craig Thompson the look of squinty-eyed wrath at which my family excels. I wish it had been one huge long book of stories from Muslim tradition. That would have been gorgeous and exciting and wonderful. Instead it was occasionally gorgeous and exciting and wonderful, but overwhelmingly unawesome. I’m going to go reread Blankets and make myself love Craig Thompson again.

But don’t take my word for it!

The catch of living in the city is that moving out, no matter your circumstances, always carries a whiff of defeat. At least that’s how your friends will see it. “Couldn’t handle it,” they’ll say over the westernmost decent cappucino in the United States. Couldn’t hack the boutique-lined, smoke-free mean streets: the fulcrum of an overprivileged New Yorker’s identity is the maniacal delusion that living here is somehow tough.

Oh my God SO TRUE. My old roommate worked as a producer for a cable channel, and every time she heard about someone moving out of the city, she would snort and say “Couldn’t make it.” It drove me batty. I don’t even know what that means (I feel like it is just a generic phrase people say in order to feel superior about their life choices), and I don’t appreciate the implied criticism of Future Jenny, who will absolutely be moving back home where she can have king cake and her very own tailgate and a car and good outdoors arts markets.

Idov isn’t attempting to write the Great American Novel, which is good because occasionally Ground Up veers into the realm of the absurd. But the satire is very funny and (this is key) precise. There’s the attempt to bourge up the joint (can that be a verb?) by doing a photography exhibit. There’s the couple’s overblown concern about using a brand of coffee that depicts a little black boy in a fez. There’s the incestuousness of the New York publishing world, which comes back to bite Mark (a reviewer for Kirkus) in the ass late in the book.

You know who I think would really enjoy this book? British ex-pats now living in one of those gentrified boutique-y Brooklyn neighborhoods where there are tons and tons of British ex-pat parents and tons and tons of slightly pretentious coffee shops. Because Ground Up is a satire about New York, but it features a very British-humor story arc of the sort typified by a show like Fawlty Towers, where everything starts out okay and then goes spectacularly to shit. Brits think this kind of story arc is hilarious. (Cf. the Mitchell and Webb bits involving Hennimore.) I think it’s hilarious for a while and then I get sort of sad and stressed because I hate it when plans don’t work and you have to make new plans.

Speaking of new plans, I finished all my Christmas shopping this past Saturday, and as always happens when I finish my Christmas shopping early, which is most years, I started having all these new, better ideas for people’s Christmas gifts. I had an amazing idea for one of my sisters. I had a pretty goodish idea for my mother, which I might just get anyway because I don’t feel good about the first present I got her except I know that’s crazy because the present is fine and I shouldn’t keep on spending money like there’s no tomorrow. It’s not good, y’all. I wish I could just shut my brain off. Meanwhile, the presents that are already perfect are so perfect that I want to tell everyone about them.

Speaking of absolutely nothing except it cracked my shit up and I’m going to forget about it if I don’t share it now, here is A Speculative List of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems.