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Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson

Amazing. Thoughtful, insightful, and faithful, all at the same time. Though sometimes the essays themselves aren't necessarily the highest form of scholarship--the final essay in particular fails to rise to this level, being mostly personal interviews with eight different Mormon women--they are still fascinating and well worth the read.

My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult

From emails to various people about this book:

"It's a book about a sick child and the choices the family has to make about whether to favor one child over another. (ie, they conceive their youngest child so that she will be a blood donor and bone marrow match for the sick child, and then suddenly they need a kidney transplant, and so should they take it from the youngest sister? What if she doesn't want to give it?) It's excruciatingly painful...the whole thing broke my heart for that family, and I haven't even had to make those choices or even think about them. I hated the ending, though; I thought it was very contrived. The interesting part of the book was going to be "how will this girl live with having basically killed her sister?" and to kill her off instead seemed like avoiding that question.

...if forced to choose, I'd put it in chicklit. There was a really cheesy romantic subplot that I think pushes it closer to chicklit, but she's a fairly good writer, and I thought her grasp of emotion was good. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending yet, but it was hugely engrossing, and made me cry several times. (It's really tragic. Really. Tragic.) In a way I'm really glad to be done with it, because that was more emotional upheaval than I could take."

Hotel World, by Ali Smith

I think Smith is a great writer, strictly in terms of her prose, which is always lyrical, but her subjects and characters don't grab me emotionally, meaning I can give only this very tepid recommendation.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris

As I just wrote in an email to a friend about this book,

"So, I just finished it, and I think I approve, overall. I also feel very chastened, mostly because in several of my past relationships, I knew pretty early that marriage wasn't going to be an option, and I kept going in them, for various reasons.

My two (small) problems with it are these: I think I've learned a lot from my dating relationships, things about myself and what I want and how a marriage should be that I couldn't have learned in a friendship. Now, of course, there was also heartbreak in those relationships, and lots of pain, but I think, in general, I'd say the pain was worth the learning (and I think at least one of my exes would too, considering he went straight from me to his fiancee, who is basically my opposite). I'd use those experiences to argue that maybe giving up dating altogether is the wrong idea, and maybe people should give up dating for dating's sake.

Second, I'm not exactly sure how to think about an abstract state of "ready for marriage." I think his advice is really solid for high schoolers and early college students who are definitely not in a good position to marry, but what about older singles? I like to think of myself as ready for marriage (at least as much as one can be, in the abstract sense), so how am I supposed to know whether I can get involved with someone or not? And sometimes, even if someone doesn't seem like a person you'd want to marry, you learn things about them through dating that change your mind. I guess Harris would say that you could learn those same things through friendship and then courtship. So maybe this point isn't valid at all.

A lot of my reaction, of course, is informed by my relationship with X--had I been listening to Harris, I never would have gotten involved. And I think Harris would approve of that. But despite all the suffering (still) associated with our relationship, I don't regret getting involved. So I guess there Harris and I just differ on how beneficial a failed dating relationship can be."

Venetia, by Georgette Heyer

I love Georgette Heyer novels, and this one is no exception. In fact, this is one of my favorites, mostly because it features an older and more mature heroine (all of 25!) and a genuine friendship between the main characters--they laugh and joke and basically just "hang out." Heyer's model of romance is so much better than the stereotypical romance-novel junk, her plots so much funnier and more interesting, and so much less focused on romance, her language so much harder and wittier, that I hesitate to even put her in the romance-novel category. Certainly, I feel no shame in admitting to people that I read her. So I'll admit to the internet: I love Georgette Heyer!

Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics, by Sasha Cagen

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a single woman. I'm happy being a single woman. I am an uncompromising romantic. I live in San Francisco. I am the target audience of this book. Yet I can't help but think this is all just self-centered, immature, confused twaddle. Plus, the entire idea is based around a typo. Yeah. I spent the entire book wondering, too, if anyone had pointed out to the author that "quirkyalone" seemed to be a simple synonym for "introvert," and she could have thus avoided all those "spelling error" squiggles Microsoft Word must have been sending up throughout the writing process. Or maybe, just maybe, if someone had pointed it out, she would have realized how redundant the concept, and the book, already are.

Nobody's Perfect, by Anthony Lane

This was my second time through this tome of Anthony Lane's collected movie reviews and columns for the New Yorker, and, like a good movie, I enjoyed it every bit as much the second time. I don't always agree with Lane's assessments, but he's still my favorite reviewer by far: smart, insightful, and bitingly funny. At least once a review, he tosses off a one-liner that many lesser writers would kill for. I'll keep this short, because otherwise I would detour off into a recap of his best lines--I have some of them typed up into a Word document on my computer--but let me just say, did he not already have someone, I would marry Anthony Lane. As it is, maybe I'll just buy the book.

Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, by Martha Beck

Interestingly, Martha Beck's book about why the Mormon church is an evil institution and why she left it only increased my faith in the gospel; while I was disturbed by her accounts of wrongdoing by those in power--and if one chooses to believe them, they are highly disturbing--her account of her experiences with the ordinary rank and file of the Mormon church and with her own spiritual life in the context of that church were so uplifting, so positive, so incredible that I ended the book thinking that even if she's right about her father's abuses and the all-controlling nature of the hierarchy, the bottom-up church is still a place where I want to be.

Also, that "if she's right" is a big thing: review after review after review of the book has pointed out factual inaccuracies, disagreed with her inrepretation of facts, and basically called her a nut job (including a review by her own sister). I won't comment on that issue, since I don't know anything more than anyone else who has written anything. (Phew! What a sentence!)

Although she's a good writer, and a good storyteller, I'd have to say that, overall, I disapproved of the book, even entirely divorced of the issues of truth, because of its tone. Throughout the book, she takes her own spirituality very seriously, and is utterly flippant about everyone else's. While I have a sense of humor, and am capable of taking serious things flippantly myself, I'd respect her a lot more if she were either equal-opportunity flippant or totally serious. As it is, she's just making her bias too obvious. Expecting Adam had some of the same unfairness--she spent the whole book explicitly and obviously borrowing Mormon theology and spirituality, and then slamming the Church, without ever acknowledging the debt she owed it, not only personally, but in terms of her beliefs. I know this is writing, and blah blah blah, but come on: that's just unfair.