Book review: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

The forty-second book I read in 2017 was How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster.  It's always dangerous to review your own book in the subtitle ("lively and entertaining"), but Foster largely succeeds in writing a helpful and accessible book. 

Foster addresses common images and structures found in literature and explains what they usually mean and why the author employs them.  He covers quests, scenes in which characters eat, monsters, weather, acts of violence, Christ figures, flight, geography, seasons, characters with physical flaws, disabilities, and diseases, and many other symbols.  Along the way, he also discusses literary allusions, politics, irony, and secondary characters. 

A reader should complete this book ready to write a Freshman Comp paper.  (Seriously, no matter what book you're assigned to read, it's got to have at least one of the tropes mentioned in it.)  Foster even provides a sample assignment, reprinting Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party" as one of the chapters and then challenging the reader to explain the story's significance. 

Foster actually is the professor of the title (at University of Michigan-Flint) so sometimes his prose gets a little trying-too-hard forced-jocular; most of the time, however, he just comes across as friendly and enthusiastic about his subject matter.  My main complaint about the book is that I am familiar with so few of the books he uses as examples.  Part of this is simply non-overlapping areas of interest; his area of expertise is twentieth-century literature, whereas I rarely read anything written after World War II.  I think, however, that he might do better to use more "classic" literature as his examples, given that his audience appears to be high school and college students. 

Book review: Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

The forty-first book I read in 2017 was Idaho by Emily Ruskovich.  This debut novel, set in the titular state, deals with Wade Mitchell's second wife Ann and her obsessive drive to understand the unthinkable family tragedy in his past.

Ruskovich's writing is beautiful, her characters deep, and the story is compelling ... at least until you realize that the author is going to offer no resolution.  Ann's precarious home life and her covert inquiries seem to be building tension toward a "The calls are coming from inside the house!" reveal which, if it existed, would have had the film rights to this book optioned six ways from Sunday, but instead all the loosely-gathered threads just unravel again.  That's fair -- the book wasn't marketed as a thriller -- but it leaves the reader unsatisfied. 

There's also a tertiary (quaternary?) character who is so tangentially related to the main plot that you feel certain he's going to end up being important, but, again, his storyline just peters out without ever reconnecting with the main narrative.  I have the feeling that perhaps an earlier draft of this book exists which did offer resolution and the author just couldn't bear to excise the character despite his failure to contribute anything but misdirection from the story.

Book review: Through the Gate in the Sea by Howard Andrew Jones

The fortieth book I read in 2017 was Through the Gate in the Sea, the sequel to Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones.  I enjoyed the previous book and went into this one with high hopes.

While recovering a family heirloom magic ring which was lost in the previous book, Mirian Raas and her crew discover the wreck of an ancient lizardfolk ship.  They also discover that Mirian has a bounty on her head, when they are attacked by pirate Meric Ensara and his crew.  Ivrian and Jeneta return from the previous book, and Mirian reconnects with her estranged half-sister Charlyn in a quest for a legendary island of lizardfolk.  Unfortunately, that island is also rumored to be the site of a legendary treasure, which attracts the attention of unsavory rivals.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as the previous one, though Meric and Charlyn are interesting additions to the cast of characters.  The end calls out for a sequel, and I'll be sure to read it if one is forthcoming.

Book review: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2017 was Agatha Christie's classic Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery.  Poirot, the famous detective, is on the train when one of the passengers is found murdered in his berth.  The train is delayed in the middle of nowhere by a snow drift, so Poirot has nothing to do but determine which of his fellow passengers is the murderer.

For what must be a bloody crime scene, Christie's novel is entirely bloodless.  The victim has no redeeming qualities and the motivation for killing him is judged not only by the reader but by Poirot himself as just and undeserving of punishment. The planning that went into the crime has more moving pieces than a Rube Goldberg machine, and it beggars belief that the execution went off (almost) without a flaw.

Book review: The September Society by Charles Finch

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2017 was The September Society, the second book in Charles Finch's Charles Lenox series.  In this sequel to A Beautiful Blue Death, Lenox is hired by the mother of an Oxford student who has disappeared and travels to the university, alma mater of both the detective and the author, to investigate.

The beginning of this book was unpromising: a virtual fawning travelogue to Oxford by a devoted alumnus.  As the plot unfolds, however, it proves to be more intricate than it first appeared.  The story is helped along by the introduction of a new character in Lord John Dallington, a Bright Young Thing prototype who wishes to shake off his aristocratic vices and become Lenox's assistant. 

I found this book to be a definite improvement over the first installment and will keep my eye out for the rest of the series.

Book review: Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2017 was Among the Mad, the sixth book in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  The book opens with a suicide bomber, which I instinctively dismissed as an anachronistic attempt at cultural relevancy before I remembered that these were the times of the anarchist movement.  It becomes quickly clear, however, that the mastermind behind the incident really is a terrorist in the modern sense of the word, threatening (and carrying out) acts of revenge against the government and British public he holds responsible for the Great War.  (I don't even consider that a spoiler.  This is a Maisie Dobbs book: of course everything revolves around World War I.)

Maisie is recruited by Special Branch, an elite division of Scotland Yard, to help find the perpetrator and stop the attacks.  (And we all know that by "help" we mean that Maisie is going to do it all on her own.)  The long-suffering Billy Beale's wife Doreen is institutionalized after sinking into a deep depression over the death of her daughter, largely so the author can contrast the sad state of mental health at the turn of the century with the modern techniques coming into vogue as mid-century approaches.  The new approach is personified by a woman doctor, but any feminism that might imply is more than undone by Winspear's treatment of Doreen as mentally weak and irrational.  (But, see, Doreen's a lower-class woman, unlike the well-educated Dr. Master, so that's okay then.  Just like child-rearing is beneath the dignity of a career woman, but it's totally okay for poor women to spend their lives providing child care for richer women's children.)

Book review: First Impressions by Charlie Lovett

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2017 was First Impressions: A Novel by Charlie Lovett.  Lovett is the son of my Brit Lit professor back in college, so I'm disheartened to report not only that I hated this book but that it betrays, in my opinion, a thoroughly misguided approach to Jane Austen.

The main character, Sophie Collingwood, inherits first a love of books and then a valuable book collection from her uncle.  When, through a legal loophole, the collection is sold without her knowledge, she sets out to recover as many of the volumes as she can.  In the course of doing so, she meets two men and discovers what appears to be an early version of Pride and Prejudice in an old book -- one printed before Jane Austen wrote the book.

Flashbacks depict Jane Austen, not yet an authoress, and a fictional cleric, Richard Mansfield, becoming acquainted in Kent.  Lovett makes his Mr. Mansfield an elderly gentleman, to avoid any creepy hints at romance with the novelist, but I am horrified by the implication that Jane would need someone of any age to mansplain writing to her, particularly when her actual first reader and giver of feedback was her sister Cassandra, a historical woman who is entirely passed over in favor of the author's made-up man who inspires, guides, and becomes a kindred spirit of Jane Austen.

Over the course of some tedious present-day machinations and fisticuffs, Sophie attempts to prove that Jane Austen and not the previously-unknown Richard Mansfield is the true author of Pride and Prejudice, but one wonders why she bothers, given that Lovett's imaginary backstory makes Mansfield as good as a collaborator and the one person most responsible for Jane's career.  Sophie herself is an unlikable heroine, at one point stealing one of her uncle's books back from a man who paid good money for it and feeling herself justified and later stealing a book from a library, an act truly beyond the pale for any bibliophile.  There's also a pointless, charmless, chemistryless Darcy-Lizzy-Wickham-style love triangle which ascribes no glory to anyone involved.