Five Stars

I first learned about Ms. Adichie from her Ted Talk.

After viewing that video I knew I needed to read her writing. I chose Americanah because I’d heard more about it than her other works, but based on how much I enjoyed this novel I know I’ll be looking the rest

The blurb on the back of the book, while technically correct, doesn’t adequately capture what the book is about. Americanah follows Ifemelu and her boyfriend Obinze through youth and into adulthood, but it is definitely Ifemelu’s book. The situations that Obinze faces are I suppose technically what the back blurb says, but overall I think it’s a better book than the one the blurb describes. The writing jumps around a lot – sometimes it is present day U.S., sometimes the Nigeria of Ifemelu’s youth, and sometimes it is the U.S. in between. But it isn’t confusing – each chapter quickly establishes the time and place, and it all works so well together to build a story.

Usually I write all through my books, but I was just too absorbed in this to make many notes. It’s nearly 600 pages long, but I read it over the course of a week while on vacation and found that when I would pick it up I’d read 100 pages in a stretch. The story itself is more interesting and complex than a simple love story – I can honestly say I did not know how it would end until I finished the book. But it’s also fantastic because of its social commentary. The main character Ifemelu starts a blog from the perspective of a Black African living in the U.S. and navigating race in a very different way than she was used to in Nigeria. The sample blog posts are interesting and insightful, as are some really great chapters about immigration and London. It’s a well-crafted piece of writing that I hope many people choose to read.

Three stars

This is a book with no plot. And I don’t mean that in an insulting way – it literally has no plot because it’s not that kind of book. I found it in this great store in downtown Seattle that is filled with lotions, soaps, snacks, classic children’s toys and gift books. It’s the kind of store that groups items not by type but by packaging color. I could spend hours in there; on our first trip there I left with three books (see my CBR6 review #31), including this one.

It’s basically a book of nostalgia. In fact, the subtitle is ‘An encyclopedia of forgotten-yet-delightful, chic, useful, curious and otherwise commendable things from times gone by.’ So yeah, a book of nostalgia.

I tend to like books like this, and for the most part this one was entertaining, but some choices the author made strike me as odd. For example, included in this 250-page volume are many deceased celebrities. I get what the author was going for – let’s bring back the glamour of this actor or the whimsy of this designer, but it’s a little weird to just see a name and description of a deceased person in a book called “Let’s Bring Back.” It struck me as indelicate.

The other big drawback is that a couple of things that the author wants to bring back have decidedly unpleasant connotations. On the first page the author suggest bringing back ‘all-white rooms,’ which on the surface sound kind of cool – furniture, walls, everything all the same color (in this case, white). But the example she provides is from a plantation in Louisiana. I’m not really ever going to be on board with ‘bringing back’ anything about plantations; I’m sure she could have found a different example. She also makes a snide comment about Monica Lewinsky at one point, which is unnecessary and mean-spirited.

Putting the tone-deafness of these items aside, there are some genuinely fun things in this book. A few were reminders for me, even triggering an audible ‘oh yeah, we should bring that back.’ Others were just entertaining – usually for things like hot mustard mousse and other food I can’t imagine seeing on a menu these days. But a mechanical desk? Or words like ‘swell’? Yeah, I can see the appeal.

How appropriate that this is my 500th post.

Five stars

I love participating in Cannonball Read for a few reasons. I didn’t know AlabamaPink, but I followed her on Pajiba and am happy to support fundraising in her name. I love that CBR motivates me to pick up a book instead of a video game or magazine, and I know I wouldn’t have read nearly as many (mostly good) books in the last 18 months without it. But one benefit I didn’t fully understand until recently is that CBR gives me the chance to improve my non-fiction writing on a weekly basis. This latest read has been particularly useful with that goal.

My husband read ‘On Writing Well’ and thought I’d enjoy it. It bodes well for a book that aspires to be a guide to writing nonfiction that it is so easy to read. Mr. Zinsser wrote the first edition of this book in 1976, but has updated it many times, most recently about eight years ago. It is well-organized, fun to read, and most importantly filled with fantastic advice, as my notebook filled with quotes from it confirms.

A few of Mr. Zinsser’s suggestions are obvious, but that doesn’t mean most people actually follow them. One thing he pushes for repeatedly is to take a stand and remove the passive voice. Until graduate school many of my instructors required that I write in the passive voice; thankfully that changed but I still find myself having to work at using my voice in my writing, especially at work. I don’t think I’m alone in that, and it’s nice to get some advice on being even stronger with my word choice.

But there’s so much more in this book than Mr. Zinsser’s enthusiasm for active sentences. He provides great examples to support his point that we should be crafting sentences, paragraphs and pieces that readers want to read. We shouldn’t be looking for the longest synonym or the most clauses in a sentence; we should tell the story in a way that works for us. He offers great advice to get us there; a few of my favorites are:
• “What do your readers want to know next? Ask yourself that question after every sentence.”
• “Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.”
• “Most adverbs and adjectives are unnecessary.”
• “Clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.”

Unfortunately, while Mr. Zinsser understands and reinforces the power of language, he seems to only allow that power in so far as he agrees with it. He mentions that he used to use ‘he’ as his generic pronoun, but feminists convinced him that such usage was sexist, and so he changed his style. He saw that not using a gender-neutral form whenever possible reinforced the idea that male is the default, and female the anomaly. But in other areas he suggests that being careful with language is just ‘political correctness’ and dismisses it. The specific example he uses – expressing his distaste for the term undocumented resident and preference for the term illegal alien – shows that he still chooses his words based on his political inclination. He sees the error in his ways on gender, but apparently not yet on nationality. That is disappointing.

Despite that one (important) area where Mr. Zinsser and I disagree, I know that much of what he wrote is solid advice. Hopefully as I incorporate his suggestions my writing – for Cannonball Read, for work, and for my own blog – will improve. Or, I should say, I will improve my writing.

Four Stars

I am whiskey drinker. I usually choose Jameson or Bushmills on the rocks, although I’m also a fan of the Four Roses Bourbon out of Lawrenceburg. Until my trip to Edinburgh last year I thought I loathed Scotch whisky; I couldn’t take the peaty, smoky smell. Upon being introduced to the Speyside single malt Scotch whiskies, however, I found another brown liquor to add to the rotation.

Given my love of whiskies, and knowing my feminist views, my husband found the perfect book to surprise me with earlier this month: Whiskey Women. I found it easy to read and full of the type of trivia I enjoy – facts that might come in handy during a pub quiz. But the book contains more than anecdotes that might help me cover my bar tab on a Tuesday night; it tells stories that I had never heard, and would wager most readers have not heard either. Aside from one discussion about Prohibition, everything in this book was new to me, providing a basic overview of a field that is wrongly assumed to be a men-only club.

Mr. Minnick starts this history with a primer on early distilling – think Egypt and the Middle Ages. But he quickly shifts his focus to the 1600s and beyond, usually breaking the stories down by region of the world. He discusses poitín makers in Ireland who cared for the community, widows in Scotland who kept family distilleries running, and U.S. women who subverted the 18th amendment by selling moonshine. Despite my assumption that this book would comprise mostly Irish and Scottish history, a large piece focuses on Prohibition, covering the role of women in its passage and its repeal, as well as the women who worked to survive when their livelihood was made illegal.

I noticed two themes appearing in every chapter through the repeal of prohibition –unsavory law enforcement tactics and clever women. Taxation and implementation played large roles in many of these stories, with revenue police who used reprehensible means to administer their versions of justice. This meant anything from arresting bootleggers to destroying all of the equipment being used in legal operations. I was not surprised to read this; power leads many people to do unsavory things, often under the protection of the law. But women repeatedly found ways to either subvert the law or work within it to continue making liquor available. Their stories are not just interesting; they are stories that anyone who appreciates quality liquor (or the right to access it) should know.

The book wraps up with a brief look at modern women distillers and whisk(e)y fans, including heads of tasting panels and creators of tasting shows that bring distillers and consumers together to provide an opportunity for these buffs to enjoy new and old favorites. This section is thin, squeezing many stories into a tight space. These stories also lack the romance found in earlier sections of the book, such as the Lady of Laphroaig, who kept her distillery running during the war.

It’s great to learn about the women who influenced a field that brings so many people enjoyment; I only have two critiques of the book. The first is that the book focuses on white women; given the pictures Mr. Mennick includes in the book, apparently only white women are ‘whiskey women.’ I do not believe this can be the case, but even if so I think the book would be better for some discussion about why women of color are not well represented in this field.

My second criticism is that while I do not think women should be compared to men, many of the statistics Mr. Mennick includes would be stronger if they were provided in context. Seven women filling a role means one thing if there are seven men doing it, and another thing if there are 700 men doing it – the former might show women were viewed as equals, while the latter might suggest that those seven women were trailblazers. Either way the context would be more interesting for me than the raw numbers.

Thee Stars

So I’ve never read anything written by Jane Austen. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did. I hadn’t even seen one of the many films / series based on her books (other than Clueless) until about two years ago, when I watched the Pride and Prejudice series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. I still haven’t read any of her work, but I now feel a bit more prepared to do so.

The Jane Austen Handbook is a 200-page book that reads as a guide to living in Regency England. It assumes the reader is actually living in that time period (as opposed to reading about a history of it), and assumed the reader is in the same class as most of the main characters in Ms. Austen’s novels. It’s a clever convention, and for the most part I enjoyed it. I think it does a decent job of explaining the period without judging it, although of course as usual the margins of my version are filled with “ack” and “hell no,” especially when discussing what unmarried women were allowed to do.

This was a pretty quick read, but I’m glad I picked it up for a couple of reasons. First, I do plan to start reading Ms. Austen’s novels when I’m traveling this summer (ah, the beauty of the e-reader – I was able to load all of her works onto it in a matter of seconds), so it’s nice to have a bit of an understanding of the time period in which her works reside. And second, when I do inevitably get confused by a term or something a character did, I can refer back to this book and have a better sense of what I’m reading.