Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted.  I didn't realize.  I have read books.  I promise.

On with the show...

This book was quite an entertaining read.  I read it in two days, which is not easy for me, and that tells me I enjoyed it.  I like quirky characters.  I like fantastic situations and supernatural phenomena.  I like adolescent protagonists.  I like book series...es.  I just might read the sequel.  I am giving this book a B-.

Why a B-?  Didn't I just say it entertained me?  Didn't it have a mixture of many things I love?  Yep.  But...adulthood and literary criticism have set in.  I have (shudder) expectations now.  Imperfections bother me unless the rest of the story is so strong it carries me beyond these cracks in the foundation and I don't feel I have to hurdle over them myself.  A few of my quibbles with the book are minor yet troubling.  One is purely based on what I've come to desire when I read fantasy or magic or what have you.  Actually, I could probably blame Harry Potter.  Anyway, here are the major pros and cons of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children:

Pro #1:  A fleshed out protagonist.  I like him.  He's normal yet not, logical yet not, young yet intelligent.

Pro #2:  A great setting.  I love WWII stories.  I love European stories.  Though the book begins in Florida, the series is clearly going to be set in mostly Europe.

Pro #3:  I felt satisfied by the easy but still clever puzzles, such as what one of the "peculiars" draws and where it clearly is, even though the heroes don't know where it is yet.

Con #1:  Continuity!  The main character would do something, a day would pass, and he would say, "The man I met this morning..."  No!  You met him yesterday!  Or how incongruent (that is so a word, why is it underlined by my Spellcheck?) the whole timeline is, period.  Or when the main character has his hands tied behind his back, but then he rolls up his pants (without being untied!) and then he's being led by a rope which would indicate his hands are in front of him, so how did all this happen?  Am I supposed to infer they untied him so he could remove his shoes, then they decided to tie his hands in front?  These are just a few examples of the continuity issues.

Con #2:  Caricature.  Some characters are just extremely stereotyped.  That's not always a bad thing, but here it almost made me put down the book at one point.  That point came when the wise old Miss Peregrine herself rips our protagonist a new asshole because of something she should know he wouldn't know not to do.  And then we find out later she does the same thing he did!  And it isn't ironic.  I also found the unemotional relationship between the protagonist and his parents disappointing.  And convenient.  And I don't like anything in literature done for convenience.

Con #3:  The big one.  My own problem, really, and I know this and I'm fine with that.  I...don't like it anymore when I feel like fantastic things are random for the coolz.  Why did the monsters look the way they did?  I understand the event that turned them into monsters, but why those particular shapes, sizes, tentacles, teeth, etc.?  I know why the author chose the "superpowers" of each of the kids (based on real photographs he has come across).  But somehow even then their powers seem...random.  The author says in an interview included in my edition that sometimes he forced photographs into the novel because they were just too cool.  That made some characters feel...forced.  I know it's nitpicky.  I know I've crossed over to some dark side that can't just shut up and go with it.  But it is what it is.

My friend and I were talking about Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 one day and she asked me to explain the point of the father's side story and the "town of cats."  I can't explain it.  But something in my gut tells me Murakami did not just include that part for the coolz.  I can feel it's meaning.  Even if I can't explain it.  I want things to have meaning even if I don't know the meaning myself.  I feel like a lot of Miss Peregrine's is just randomness with no metaphor.  Ugh, I'm beginning to need metaphor.  What's wrong with me?

Anyway, it took me way longer than necessary to write this.  Hopefully soon I will read a book that completely blows me away.

The Book Thief Post #2

I gave up as soon as I was told to pay attention down the road, then had a metaphor that hadn't happend yet explained to me, then time jumped again.

The Book Thief Post #1

I'm reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  Kind of.  I just came to the realization (five minutes ago) that if I'm going to read it - because I was thinking of abandoning it - I'm going to have to skip the bold passages where he uses meta-fiction to steer readers toward his message.  I just.  can't.  handle.  it.  It's like watching a movie with someone who's seen the movie, and they keep poking you and telling you what's going to happen next and how it affects the outcome of the movie.  Or is whispering to you the whole time about what you should be thinking by the end of each scene. 

STFU.

The Dark Lantern

I eventually just had to kinda skim through this novel after reading nearly two hundred pages.  It's a little over four hundred pages, and once I realized the characters were just mediocre and it seemed like the whole novel would be the same thing over and over, I decided to flip through it to find something that would seem different or interesting.  I found nothing.  I'm sure people who like novels set in the late 1800's would love this book, though, as it is rich with descriptions of the London setting.  I, however, can't even be bothered to wonder what gradiation of C I would give it, so I'm just going to give it a C.

B Grades

Today would be a good day to continue my long-defunct series on why I give certain grades to the novels I read.  I believe I'm up to 'B' now.  Since I just gave a wonderful novel a grade of 'B' rather than what it would have scored had it ended better, maybe it's a good day to reflect on 'B' novels in general.

It's funny, because in movies a B-movie would be regarded as at once a failure and a success.  B-movies fall into that one and only awesome category of "so bad it's good."  It isn't quite so in my literary estimation.  'B' books are ones that are brilliantly written in some way or another but fall just shy of perfection.

'B' is for 'but.'  In other words, "this book is amazing, but...."  For instance, Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky is a beautiful depiction of the philosophy of life and fate, but I've often felt there was a missed opportunity with the character of Tunner.  I feel like he just disappears from the novel, and while I know that was Bowles's intention, I was left unsatisfied.  Remember, these grades are highly personal, so though I can step back and examine Bowles's motivations for the choices he made in the story, I still have a nagging feeling there could have been a different choice that would have been more satisfying.

That doesn't even mean I wouldn't give an 'A' grade to a book where something is left wholly unexplained.  I think The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is extremely brilliant, and it gets a hearty 'A' even though there is a feeling that the reader (and the collective narrator) will never truly understand what led these girls to their decisions.  It's underlying, and the reader can infer, but I didn't finish the book feeling in any way dissatisfied with the events within.

'B' is for 'box.'  Because the books that earn a 'B' grade go in a box.  They don't go on my bookshelf because that's reserved for 'A' books, books on writing, journals, writing files, and miscellaneous items.  The 'B' books go in a box because for some reason I can't let them go but I may not know why.  Maybe, like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I will slowly realize it meant more to me than I originally thought.

'B' is, then, for 'back again.'  These are the books that seem to fester somewhere in the back of my mind, and it may be because they have flaws that I wish to examine.  Very few books are presented perfectly, and any author worth her salt would say there is always room for revision, even eighty-five years down the line (though not revision from some prescriptive bullshit editors who co-wrote a certain 'on writing' book).  These also may be the books that truly inspire, because where there are flaws there are opportunities for new writers to examine the other possiblities, what could have happened had the story taken the other fork in the road.  Tunner becomes a new character, with a new name, but his story is carried forward.  Tunner is 'back again.'

In the book I just finished, 1Q84, one of the main characters (Tengo) is a writer.  He ghost-writes a novel with a seventeen-year-old girl and then decides to continue the story in his own new novel, fleshing out the world the seventeen-year-old presented and putting new characters into it.  Tengo must have felt the original novel fell short of something, or at least that there was opportunity for exploration.  Is there a good 'B'-word for 'exploration'?

Yes.  'B' is for 'beyond.'  Beyond these characters and this particular story there is room to build.  'B' is also for 'building.'  The story, like the mansion from Rose Red, isn't finished and may keep 'building' itself if only in the imaginations of those who have entered. 

1Q84

I finished reading the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.  It took quite a long time because it was 925 pages long.  Which is fine by me; I love a good, long novel more than anything.  I love being invested in the various characters and following multiple story lines.  I like connecting dots and forming an image of a distinct time and place.

This novel was a dream as far as characters and pacing.  Many readers would have found it too slow, too drawn out, and would most likely give up.  Although I'm not sure that's true because once you get to a certain point you will develop a need to know how the story ends.

That would be it's one downfall, though.  The ending was highly anticlimactic.  I, in a way, knew that was coming because Murakami kept invoking Chekov's Gun (Anton Chekov's rule that once a gun is introduced into a story it has to be fired) and there was a palpable feeling throughout that Murakami would break that rule.  He did, but I also expected at least a little more action for an ending, a little more story, than there was.

Overall I would give this book a high B+.  It would have scored an easy A if there had been a little more to the ending because it was all too easy after 900 pages of suspense and tension.

The Story and Its Writer

One autumn, over a period of about four months, I worked my way through the anthology The Story and Its Writer: Fifth Edition. It contains something like 140 short stories, plus some essays and commentary that I'm currently working through. The stories in the volume are, to any extent, the best of Western Literature with a slight mixture of authors from farther East. Of course I found most stories to be, on a personal scale, mediocre, but I don't think that diminishes their worthiness to be included in such an anthology. No one could possibly be fundamentally affected by every story in a 140-story volume. But just on a personal note, these are the stories that for some reason resonated deeply with me:

Peaches by Abe Akira
River of Names by Dorothy Allison (more than any other)
An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
That Evening Sun by William Faulkner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Kinsman, Major Molineux by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (arguably the most important)
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates


The stories people thought I would love that I actually hated or felt mild distaste for:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
On with the Story by John Barth (I've talked about this before)
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
How to Become a Writer by Lorrie Moore
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

Right now I won't go through each one and what I loved about it. Anyone who has read most of the stories in the first category will know a lot of them deal with something supernatural or with temporal dissonance. But they do so rather cleverly. Anyway, I was just anthologizing a little myself.

P.S.  I hate Blogger's new layout.  Hate it.