The Best Books I Read in 2013

To catch up on previous years:

The Best Books I Read in 2012
The Best Books I Read in 2011
The Best Books I Read in 2010
The Best Books I Read in 2009

If you want to, you can even go to Goodreads and see all the books I read in 2013. Now my favorite reads from 2013, in very particular order:

10. Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris. I didn't want the Sookie Stackhouse series to end - at least not before Sookie and Bill reconciled and Bill made her his vampire bride - but since it had to, I'm glad Harris did it her way.

Full review here (contains spoilers). This was a book I checked out from my local library.

9. Finding Esta by Shah Wharton. I was pleasantly surprised by this fresh take on contemporary vampire mythology, the debut novel by a talented writer from the U.K.

Full review here (contains minor spoilers). This is an e-book I downloaded from Smashwords on a day when the author gave it away as a free promotion.

8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  I didn't give this one a full review, but the weekend I checked it out from my local library, I could hardly put it down until I was finished. It's nonfiction, the story of a woman who changed medical history without knowing she did so. Henrietta Lacks was a poor, uneducated tobacco farmer who was pregnant with her son when doctors discovered she had a cervical tumor. After she gave birth, doctors treated her cancer with radiation and, without her knowledge or consent, took a sample of her cancerous cells and kept them alive in the laboratory. This was the first time human cells were ever able to be made "immortal," or grown perpetually in the lab. These cells made a wide variety of medical research possible, and companies profited from that research while the Lacks family was too poor to even afford health insurance. Sadly, Henrietta died an awful, painful death when her cancer rapidly came back despite the radiation treatment - which, in all honesty, was fairly horrific itself - while her children were all still small.

This book is an investigation into the woman behind the cells (known in medical literature as HeLa cells, after Henrietta), her legacy, and how medical science as a business and as a pure science can improve its ethics and treatment of human beings. I chose this because it was the book of the year at the college from which I graduated.

7. In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler. This one is also nonfiction, and again it deals with cancer, although this is a memoir written by a survivor. It's infuriating, difficult, and inspiring.

I didn't write a full review of this one, but you can read a blog post on it here. This is a post about Ensler's spirituality in her memoir. I got this book free from the Amazon.com Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

6. Dreams of Joy by Lisa See. This is the sequel to See's Shanghai Girls, a work of historical fiction set in 20th-century China and then in the United States, exploring the world of two immigrant sisters, Pearl and May. Shanghai Girls is a beloved book in my family, read first by my grandmother, then by my mother, then by me. At the end of the first book, Pearl's daughter Joy impulsively moves to China. Dreams of Joy relates the story of what happens to her there, and what happens to Pearl as she goes to (she assumes) rescue Joy. I never wrote a full review; I don't know what to say except it was very good, and also very hard in places.

I purchased a used hardcover of this book at a library book sale.

5. Lover at Last by J.R. Ward. I'm hopelessly addicted to Ward's paranormal romance series with the warrior-vampires. I love all the couples, but I was SO ready for this, the only book in the series to focus on a male-male couple. They're Blay and Qhuinn, and their partnership gives me a lot of feels. I've wanted them to be together since Blay first expressed feelings for his friend, but Qhuinn was being such a jerk about it. All that angst is resolved now, though, and Team Qhuay is officially a thing.

Full review here (includes spoilers). This is a book I checked out from the public library. 

4. The Divergent Trilogy (I'm kind of cheating here, but I'm going to count them all as one book) by Veronica Roth. For those of you fresh to this young adult/dystopian series, I'm not going to spoil anything here. Let's just say that if you liked the Hunger Games trilogy, you're going to be equally enthusiastic about young Beatrice "Tris" Prior and her cohort.

Divergent review here (spoilers)

Insurgent review here (no real spoilers, just a basic plot outline) 

Spoiler-free Allegiant discussion post

Allegiant review (spoilers)

I bought a paperback Divergent at Barnes and Noble, checked out Insurgent from the local library, and bought Allegiant as an e-book for my Nook. 

3. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Hazel Grace Lancaster is just a normal teen with cancer, a young woman who's already outlived her life expectancy thanks to a "miracle drug." She doesn't love the cancer support group, but she does fall in love there, with Augustus Waters, a brilliant, witty, kind young man who lost a leg to bone cancer that's now in remission. This is an important literary novel disguised as YA fiction, and I cannot wait to see the movie.

I never wrote a full review of this novel, mostly because it gives me so many feelings, I become an inarticulate sniffling mass. I paid full retail for this hardcover at a store that was not a bookstore, because I had a gift card. After I read it, my grandma read it. She liked it, too, and she's not one to read YA books normally. 

2. Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck. Historical fiction set in Key West in the 1930s, with a Cuban-American protagonist who's kind of in a love triangle with Ernest Hemingway? It's perfection.

I didn't write a formal review of this book on this blog, but I did discuss the first half of it here. I received this one through the Amazon.com Vine program in exchange for a review.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Without realizing it, I checked an abridged version out of the library. I wish I'd read the unabridged version, because after 800 pages, I still wanted more of this classic. The story is compelling and the characterization is interesting. It's everything you could ask for from a dead Frenchman.

Full review here (contains spoilers). I read this as a library book, and then subsequently purchased a used paperback of the unabridged version at a library book sale. 

Goddesses in Eve Ensler's Memoir 'In the Body Of the World'

I finished reading In the Body of the World, the 2013 memoir by dramatist/activist Eve Ensler, on Monday night. Because I wrote about it in some detail on Book Club Friday last week, I don't feel the need to share my review here, although I did review it on Amazon and Goodreads.

Instead, I thought I 'd write about the goddess chapter in this book, in which Ensler - an atheist with an ethnic Jewish father and a WASP mother - calls upon the aid of two goddess-figures as she battles the cancer inside her. The chapter is called "Tara, Kali, and Sue." Although the chapters aren't numbered (they aren't in my ARC - maybe they are in the final print edition), it occurs approximately in the center of the book.

Yet before she starts chemotherapy, Ensler takes a pink shawl, lays it out reverently, and makes an altar to Tara and Kali. Tara is for protection. She calls Tara "the mother of all Buddhas" and says she fights off fear and demons.

Tara

My introduction to Tara came through a book called Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin by John Blofeld (Shambhala Publications - Boston - 1977). This book is the same age as me, and I think I picked it up at a yard sale. I wrote about Kuan Yin in The Smell of Gas, but it's difficult to say whether the book was intended to be research or just part of my usual habit of collecting feminist and feminine-spiritual books.

Blofeld writes, "...Tara, a beautiful deity able to manifest herself in twenty-one different forms for the sake of succoring sentient beings...emanating from the compassionate Bodhisattva, she is immensely popular in Tibet and Mongolia where her devotees credit her with two main functions: rescuing beings from present woes and assisting them to rid themselves of the delusions binding them to samsara....

"....Whether visualized as a sweet-faced matron or as a winsome sixteen-year-old maiden, she has two principal embodiments known as the Green Tara and the White. They are much alike except that, from her seat upon a moon disc supported by a giant lotus, the Green Tara extends one foot as though about to rise from meditation, whereas the White Tara sits in meditation posture and further differentiated by having a 'wisdom eye' in the centre of her forehead as well as eyes in the palms of each hand."

Blofeld goes on to say that Tara is merged with Kuan Yin in the popular Chinese imagination, and that she is beloved figure among Tibetan, Nepali and Mongolian Buddhists. Unfortunately, I don't know much else about Tara, but the idea of her seems to be strongly linked to the embodiment of the Buddha's compassion. 

Kali

Kali is for what Kali is always for: destruction. Death. Burning. Kali's destructive path of fire is ultimately constructive: she burns away what must be burned away so that life can continue. Here, she represents the lifesaving destructiveness of the chemo itself, the poison that will burn away the rapidly dividing killing cells.



Kali is also depicted with the third eye/wisdom eye in the center of her forehead. Tara is compassion, and Kali is destruction, but both embody wisdom - wisdom is essential in all things, whether saving a life from excruciating suffering or bringing cleansing through death.

Ensler's prayer reads:

"Burn it away, Kali, burn it away. Make it new. Take me to the core of holy destruction and death and let me survive your excruciating heat. Let me throw what isn't useful into your flame. Dissolve it there are make me new, make me whole. Burn off all the cells that are compulsively dividing and subdividing. Burn off all the parts of me that create separation and division. Burn off the stories. Burn off my contempt and my self-pity. Burn off all the ways I get ahead of myself and try to get ahead of others. And Tara, open my heart. Make me one with all sufferers."

Sue

The Sue of the chapter title refers to Ensler's therapist, who tells, her, "The chemo is not for you. It is for the cancer, for all the past crimes, it's for your father, it's for the rapists, it's for the perpetrators. You're going to poison them now and they are never coming back. Chemo will purge the badness that was projected onto you but was never yours....Your job is to welcome the chemo as an empathetic warrior, who is coming in to rescue your innocence by killing off the perpetrator who got inside you...fighting on your behalf and on behalf of all women's bodies, restoring wholeness, innocence, peace."

Calling on Tara, Kali and Sue works for Ensler. The chemo works. Her cancer retreats, and she lives to eat and work again. She lives to visit the Congo and see the City of Joy and the wild gorillas. In a Hawthornesque fashion, the book ends with a word repeated three times:

Rising. Rising. Rising

Actually, the closing line of "Rising" strikes several literary chords - not only Hawthorne's "Be true! Be true! Be true!" but also Maya Angelou's "And Still I Rise" and even the ending of Virginia Woolf's closing of Orlando, with Orlando rising up and crying out, "It is the goose!...the wild goose!," the elusive beauty that can never quite be caught the way the poet struggles to capture individual moments on the page, but the past is always elusive and the poet is always caught in the present.

The title, In the Body of the World, may call to mind the admonition among Christians, "Be in the world but not of the world" - in reverse. Ensler is asking us through this book to be in our bodies and of the world, valuing ourselves, valuing other people and valuing the planet as a whole. Is that opposed to Christian doctrine? Not at all. Christians remind each other not to value worldly, material things more than they value the eternal things, but that doesn't mean to neglect other people or let the planet come to harm. Having a hope for an eternal life isn't an excuse to cause or allow misery in this one.

When Ensler asks us to be of the world, she wants us to think about how our actions in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or some of the other very privileged parts of the world can affect people in the less-privileged parts of the world - not because of some misguided "white savior complex" but in the very real sense that we're all made of the same fragile stuff. Whether there is heaven, reincarnation, enlightenment or not, we all have a very finite time in these human skins.

Yet we are rising. There's hope. No matter what our religion or lack thereof, at times we need to call on the wisdom of other human beings. Sometimes, too, we need to call on something greater than ourselves and our limited human powers. Sometimes even atheists have need of the infinite power and compassion of the Goddess, whether one imagines the Goddess as something part of ourselves or as separate from ourselves.


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Book Club Friday: Reading 'In the Body of the World' (Memoir) by Eve Ensler

This Friday I'm reading In the Body of the World, the memoir by Eve Ensler, the activist and writer best known for The Vagina Monologues. I got an ARC of this book free from the Amazon Vine program - free book in exchange for my own honest opinion in a review. I'm about 80 pages into it right now, and it's about 217 pages long.

The Blurb From GoodReads: From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek’s150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection—to the body, the self, and the world.

Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”

But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.

Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

I said this wasn't going to be an easy memoir to read, but it's not just a litany of true horror stories. Ensler is first and foremost a survivor, and you don't get to be a survivor unless you're able to rise above the worst you've been through with some resilience and good humor. There's some tough stuff in the Monologues, too, but at the same time, it's very funny and real, and you come away not with the sense that the world is hopeless and all is lost, but that the secret to existing as a human on this planet is, and always has been, embedded in the female spirit.

That's what makes this book not only bearable to read, but actually enjoyable. It's not that you're enjoying cancer, abuse and torture, it's that you're enjoying the ability of women to survive, thrive, and look toward the future with hope.

The title, I think, refers to the fact that we all have to live within one finite, very limited, fragile human body, yet that one body has the ability and the power to make an enormous impact on the world. She's constantly linking events in her own life and in her own body with events on a global scale. The infection raging through her body reminds her of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as she's watching the tragedy unfold on TV. These are some of the most powerful passages. This was the one that really got me:

"Afterward I meet with my oncology team, who seem utterly distracted....They send me to another distracted, testy, arrogant doctor dude who makes me feel that my questions are childish and wasting his time....

"Then he says the mantra of the end of the world. 'WE LIKE TO THROW EVERYTHING AT IT. That's all we know how to do.' And I say, 'The only problem is that IT is attached to ME.' And I swear, he doesn't flinch. Me is irrelevant. Me is personal and specific. Me is what has to be passed through to get where he is going. Me is what can be sacrificed to get better information. And I suddenly know what the bride in Pakistan felt when the drones bombed her wedding and her fiance splintered into pieces and her mother was only fragments of a dress. They were throwing everything at al-Qaeda. And I suddenly love my infection and my protective scar tissue, which are saving me from everything they want to throw at me."

That made me angry. That made me think, "How dare you!" How does anyone, ever, dare think it might be okay to drop a bomb on someone's wedding?!? Why might you think it would be okay to kill people by remote control at all? How could compassionate people who supposedly care about something other than themselves - including President Obama - not ban drones for anything other than surveillance? Why haven't the American people protested against this disgusting practice until drone strikes were banned? Because look at who the bad guys is here - it's not those awful Congolese militia members who are torturing the women - it's Americans (and Canadians and the British, to a much lesser extent). It's US.

Which I'm sure is the point of this book. It's supposed to make us upset, but in a constructive way. It's supposed to take that classic second wave feminist expression, "The personal is political," and flip it inside out to where we'll see that the political is also personal.

I still contend that everyone should either read or see a performance of The Vagina Monologues. I don't know yet if I could make the same endorsement of In the Body of the World, but I still think a lot of people will derive a lot of value from reading it.

Have you read this? What did you think?




(I am an Amazon affiliate, and if you buy this book or anything through this link, I earn a small percentage.)

Oh How Pinteresting! 'Cloud Atlas' and the Masterpiece Classic 'Wuthering Heights'

Look what came in the mail today! I know this isn't going to be an easy book to read, but I suspect it's going to be a worthwhile read.



On Monday I watched Cloud Atlas. I didn't read David Mitchell's novel, and maybe that's why I was so utterly baffled and confused by this movie. Someone please tell me - is it so brilliant it went over my head, or is it just a hot muddled mess of characters in six different timelines?



...and when the characters start speaking in dialect that's supposed to be a futuristic descendant of English? Even subtitles wouldn't have helped. You need a new dictionary to get this movie.

This is one of Hugh Grant's characters in it.



He kinda looks like Rick Genest (that Canadian model who appears in "Born This Way" with Lady Gaga). But this is the part that's really going to stick with me: the Frobisher-Sixsmith feels.



I mean, it would kill Hollywood to make one big-budget movie with a gay couple that gets a happy ending?!? Hollywood, I will give you good American money to see a gay rom com that ends with the happy couple cheerfully eating strawberries off each other. I don't want the young LGBTQIA thinking their love lives have to turn out like A Single Man, Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry because that's all they see in the media. You're sending mixed messages when you say "It gets better," but in every single movie it gets worse.

Okay, ranty thing done. I also saw this movie. Wuthering Heights is one of my top 5 favorite books ever, but I'd never seen the Masterpiece Classic version until last Friday.



At first I was like, "Tom Hardy as Heathcliff? Ew. No." Then I started watching it, and I was like, "I wish he'd stop using that stupid Bane voice." To be fair, the Bane voice pops up a few times, but he sounds normal through most of it. He's not OMG-great, but he's not terrible, either.

I liked this adaptation. I don't think I ever appreciated Edgar Linton as much as I did when he was played by Andrew Lincoln. I still kinda blows my mind that he's actually English and not U.S. Southern.



Ralph Fiennes remains my favorite movie Heathcliff.



But now I can't stop watching the Bad Lip Reading take on The Walking Dead.

I read this last week. Obnoxiously, I have volumes 1, 2, 4 and 6. I'll have to see if the library can fill in the gaps, because $15 a piece (at Barnes and Noble) is a lot to pay for a graphic novel series of which there are at least 17 volumes.

The Complete First Season: 3-Disc Special Edition

Vagina, Vagina, Vagina

Yesterday I mentioned the Michigan lawmaker who banned a female colleague, Rep. Lisa Brown, from speaking because she used the word "vagina" during debate over an abortion bill.



The subject has been quite eloquently addressed by bloggers including Shah Wharton and Guerrilla Mom. Shah suggests you experience Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in book form or in performance, and I wholeheartedly agree.

This post is all about vaginal pride.



This post is about not fearing the word "vagina," or the body part it represents. This post is about letting women be women. (This is from Shah's post.)



Sometimes vaginas get angry. (This is from Guerrilla Mom's post.) Think of "fear" here in the old-fashioned sense of "respect, awe," as in the expression "fear of the Lord." That's the proper attitude for approaching the subject of the sacred yoni.



Sometimes vaginas can be sweet, too. And sexy. Very sexy.



You know what vaginas shouldn't be? Silenced, in the Michigan state legislature or anywhere else. "Vagina" is anatomically correct, like clitoris, elbow, patella, penis, coccyx, vulva, larynx. If "vagina" is too formal and stuffy for you, use "pussy" or "cunt." Use them lovingly, adoringly, respectfully.



Use them loudly.

Tomorrow is U.S. Independence Day, but to paraphrase Bill Pullman in the movie Independence Day, this could be our vaginas' independence day.