Review: Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Let's all agree that Amy Poehler is adorably great.  I love the shows she has appeared in (Arrested Development), starred in (Parks and Recreation), and produced (Broad City).  She never seems to hold back, always giving an honest and unapologetic performance, especially as Leslie Knope in Parks and Rec.  After reading the cover of Yes Please in Target, I decided it had enough Poehler fun and honesty to check out from the library.

Before I go any further, I really need to confess that the blatant disregard of that comma in the title upsets me.  This irritation has not lessened over time, and if I had not finished this book and this post sooner, I really cannot say what might have happened.

I have read very few memoirs.  In fact, I'm not entirely sure what a memoir is.  The only one I know I've read for sure is the wonderful The Glass Castle because it told me it was "a memoir" right on the cover.  Having never read a comedian's memoir before, I did not really know what to expect.  It was a collection of the experiences that have led her to this moment, the moment where she is famous enough and old enough to write an entire book about her journey and have people actually interested in reading it.  A criticism I had while nearing the end was the question of audience.  Who exactly was supposed to be reading this?  It seemed like a very long letter to Poehler's closest friends, which provided a nice intimate tone but felt slightly exclusionary.  Then after reading this great review, I agreed with this blogger that Amy Poehler was writing for herself.

Yes Please reads almost more like an advice book than a memoir, and there were several quotes or mottoes that resonated with me.  A favorite about knowing her own tricks: "I am really onto myself.  I've got Amy Poehler's number."  Another, in regards to choices women have to make as parents and career people: "Good for you. Not for me."

This book was quick, mostly light, and funny with a lot of charming photos.  If you like Poehler, you should read it and become your friend circle's Amy Poehler expert.  And if you've never checked out her "Smart Girls at the Party" video clips on her website, go! Do it!  Here are some good ones:

Review: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Remember The Lowland?  It was the March selection for A Beautiful Mess's book club.  Yes, March.  It's been a long and arduous journey.  For most of it, I just wanted to put it down and pick up something totally different like a quick-paced mystery, but I felt a strong sense of responsibility to you.  You need to know about The Lowland.  And finally, I will tell you about it.

I have not read any of Jhumpa Lahiri's works before, but I had heard goods things about them from various readers, and I noticed several copies of The Lowland on hold at my workplace, an academic library.  I also saw that it had been mentioned in the New York Times Book Review.  This led me to believe I would be reading an important contemporary novel of significant value that would in some way or another enrich my literary life.  I'm not going to sugar-coat it; this book was a terrible disappointment for me.

Subhash and Udayan are very close brothers who grew up together in Calcutta in the 1960s, when that part of India was rocked with a rebellion movement.  Udayan, the younger brother by less than a year, is secretly involved in this violent revolutionary attempt, looking to Mao and Che Guevara for inspiration.  Subhash is an academic who goes to the United States to pursue doctoral studies in environmental chemistry.  Shortly after Udayan marries the lonely and philosophical Gauri without his parents' permission, the rebellion swallows him.  His parents, brother, and wife, four family members who are so isolated from one another geographically or emotionally that they are almost strangers, must learn to exist without their beloved son, almost-twin, and soulmate.  Strong themes of isolation and regret fill the pages with little to no forgiveness and love to balance.

The main problem with The Lowland is that nothing happens and it takes a long time to do it.  Lahiri sets up a wonderful story that has so much potential, but just when you think the plot begins to climb to an exciting level of complexity, it falls flat and remains at that plateau for the characters' entire stories.  I love Irish literature, so I'm always up for a good, devastatingly sad story, but The Lowland is not that.  It has one heartbreaking event that the characters languish in, refusing to heal and evolve in their mourning.  Other scenes had the latency to be deliciously sad, but their muted sentimentality left them completely anticlimactic.  The characters all make very interesting life choices, but the author fails to satisfactorily explore their motives and emotions.  The back of the cover promised "shimmering" writing with "uncommon elegance."  I was totally unimpressed with Lahiri's writing.  Of course it was written well enough, but not a single phrase struck me with its beauty, no analogy swept me away with any sort of originality.

In her discussion of the book, Emma of A Beautiful Mess suggests that Gauri is an example of "feminism gone wrong."  I assume she means Gauri used the freedom feminism advocates for evil or that she took advantage of her freedom to do "wrong" things.  While I really dislike the phrase "feminism gone wrong" to describe this character's actions, in some regards I agree with Emma.  Gauri could represent the past and present fear of women with passions for their careers and the belief that these women are selfish and slightly monstrous.  Almost everything Gauri does after Udayan dies is self-serving and loveless.  Traditional female roles do not suit her; her one lasting passion is studying philosophy.  Gauri could be a cautionary tale of career women who reject family by allowing a purpose outside the family unit to overtake their traditional responsibilities, thus destroying the lives of all the family involved.  While I agree that Gauri could be a representation of this fear of feminism, her story is not the reality of most passionate career women in real life, and it is no fault of feminism that Gauri had the opportunities to be so selfish.

Have you read The Lowland?  What did you think?

Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Lovely February is just about pack up its dirty snow and old chocolate hearts, making way for Spring breaks, shamrocks, Lent, The Walking Dead, and a certain madness that entails endless basketball games.  I assume the "Madness" refers to my state of being after listening to a month-long infinity of either zombie breaths rasping through dirty straw-sized wind pipes or sneaker squeaks sounding from the living room.

Luckily February's departure also means that the A Beautiful Mess blog book club posted a discussion of their February selection today.  I'm very interested to see what people in that creative and crafty world of DIY bloggers have to say about The Fault in Our Stars.

Hazel Grace Lancaster is a sixteen-year-old girl who is anything but normal.  The only typical teenage-girl part of her is her weakness for America's Next Top Model.  Otherwise she is a snarky, thoughtful reader of deep, intellectual novels and poetry who takes college English courses and considers her mom her best friend.  She also has terminal thyroid cancer.  At a support group session, Hazel meets a dreamy ex-basketball player who buys cigarettes not to smoke them but to satisfy an atypical obsession with metaphor.  Augustus Waters also has cancer, but a surgical removal of his leg leaves him in remission.  The two find themselves star-crossed in love almost at first sight.

For me, reading The Fault in Our Stars was sort of a love/hate relationship, but those are strong words, so let's call it a like/dislike situation.  Unfortunately I could not ignore the achingly cliche and romanticized characters in this story.  The brilliantly witty girl who doesn't know she's gorgeous.  The blue-eyed mountain of man muscles with an extensive vocabulary and a blunt sense of humor.  I found them very unrealistic.  The plot, too, was precisely predictable.  Perhaps this was because John Green employed a lot of foreshadowing.

Nevertheless, I found this book very enjoyable and tore through the virtual pages of my Kindle. 
For me, this was not so much a love story between a boy and a girl as it was a story about the love between a kid and her parents. For me the most touching scenes were between Hazel and her mom and dad, not between Hazel and Augustus. I didn't cry very much (I know, I may be a robot) but the parts I did get choked up on always involved Hazel's parents.

About halfway through, it became a much more meaningful read for me when a co-worker showed me an article (from People magazine, maybe?) about Green's inspiration for the novel, Esther Grace Earl, a teenage girl who died of thyroid cancer.  The article explained that Esther had two goals, the first to make a difference, which she definitely did through her foundation for families with kids with cancer.  The second was to kiss a boy, but Esther never found the right boy or the right moment.  Green's dedication of The Fault in Our Stars to Esther along with girls' shared middle name made Hazel and Augustus's love story a fulfillment of Esther's second wish.  This gave the book another layer of purpose for me, making it a sweet tribute to a real and courageous girl.

The book club's March selection is The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, which is another very popular novel from 2013.  I've been wanting to read this one, so this is a great excuse to make it happen.  What about you?  Have you read The Lowland? Will you read it this March?  It's probably a great Spring break read. :)

Review: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

The very successful Missouri-based DIY/lifestyle blog A Beautiful Mess has started a book club!  I read their first selection, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.  While Emma of A Beautiful Mess posted some thought-provoking responses to the discussion questions she posted, I won't be responding to the questions since I don't want to spoil the book for you.  Instead I will give you a review so you can decide to read The Interestings yourself and then take a look at their discussion.

Wolizter's novel follows the lives of a group of teenagers who met at an art camp in the 1970s.  There's Ethan Figman, animation wizard; Jonah Bay, talented son of a famous folksinger; Ash Wolf, aspiring feminist actor; Goodman Wolf, Ash's architect brother; Cathy Klipinger, dancer with a womanly body; and Jules Jacobson, funny girl.

Jules, Ethan, Jonah, Cathy, Ash, and Goodman spend a summer at camp together and form an important bond.  Before this, Jules was an awkward teenage girl mourning the loss of her father.  After she meets these five kids, her life shifts directions.  That summer Jules discovers creativity and a love for the arts, but more importantly she discovers a wealthy, stylish family, Ash and Goodman’s.  Ash, Goodman, and the Wolf parents devour Jules, command her attention, sway her morals, and engross her until she cannot tell where they begin and she ends, as symbolized in an scene where an aerial photo is being taken of the all the campers lying on the ground creating giant letters with their bodies.  Jules feet touch Goodman’s head, and Ethan’s feet rest on Jules head, creating a seamless limb of the larger being created by the campers.

After that first life-changing summer, the group of friends remain as close as possible.  Jules takes the train from her boring, ordinary New York suburb into the glittering NYC to spend weekends with the Wolf family and Ethan, Jonah, and Cathy, who all live in the city.  They support each other’s creative pursuits: Cathy’s dance, Ethan’s animation, Jules’ and Ash’s acting.  Couples develop within the group, one ultimately changing the lives of all six of them.

Meg Wolizter’s writing is so naked and her imagery fresh and creative.  Two main themes in the novel are the relevancy of the arts and jealousy.  The book focuses on a group of people who each have talent, some greater than others, and shows how that affects their career choices.  In some cases, like Ethan’s and Ash’s, money allows them to pursue their talent as a profession and acquire fame, respect, and more money.  Cathy and Jonah have truly great talent but ultimately choose different fields career-wise for various reasons.  Jules and Goodman both struggle to find and develop their talents, and Jules finally turns her attention to another field.  This brings us to the second theme of jealousy.  Jules, having given up acting, struggles with her envy for her friends Ethan and Ash and the success they experience in the arts.  Jules’s jealousy taints her marriage and career and keeps her from seeing her life as full and happy.

The themes of art’s usefulness and jealousy spoke to me personally.  I seem to be reading a lot of books that speak to me personally, such as The Bell Jar.  This should make obvious sense since I am the one who decides what I read, but as a former English major, this is still a new phenomenon for me. But this one I actually didn't pick out.  I didn't know anything about this book before I blindly checked out the DIY blog's book club selection from the library, so I'm happy that I found it relevant.  The question of art’s importance in today’s job market is an ever-present concern for liberal arts graduates like me.  Where do we use the artistic skills we were praised for in high school and college in the “real world”?

Some of the criticism I found while scrolling through the comments of A Beautiful Mess’s discussion post labeled Jules as a selfish complainer.  This is true.  Jules is selfish and allows her envy to consume her at times.  Ash and Goodman are selfish too, but it is manifested in different ways than Jules.  The characters’ selfishness and other imperfections make them real.  It makes them human and raw and ugly at times.  But the humanity makes the novel worthwhile.  There is a section in Part II where Jules and her self-pitying get to be quite annoying, but in Part III, the plot starts to come full circle, foreshadowing is fulfilled, and you’re left with great imagery and themes to meditate on.

This passage is an example of the great insight Wolizter has for the problem artistic people have when finding their purpose in life.  I loved this advice Ethan gave Jonah after he confided in Ethan about his wasted musical talent.

The book club's February selection is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which was getting a lot of hype even before its film adaptation was announced for this summer.  You should join me in reading this one!!  A Beautiful Mess will be posting discussion questions at the end of February, and I will be reviewing it later this month as well.

Tomorrow I'll be posting about Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, so stayed tuned for that!  (Two posts in a row! I know!)