Because I'm in that kind of mood

I got one friend laying across from me

I did not choose him, he did not choose me

We've got no chance of recovery 

Sharing hospital joy and misery, joy and misery

joy and misery

- Cold War Kids, Hospital Beds 

Sad face for Cambodia soulmate's departure

Emily and I at Bayon Temple our third month in Cambodia

My amazing and talented friend/roommate/Cambodian compatriot left the country today to pursue an MFA degree. We arrived in Cambodia and started work at the office on the same day. To hear Emily tell it, I might have been a bit of a bossy bitch when she and I met: She was sitting on a couch waiting for someone to tell her what to do when I came up to her and said, "Why are you sitting there?" in a sort of authoritative manner. She explained that she was new and that she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do. I then plopped down next to her and it turned out I was new too. And, like her, also from New York.

To go into all that we've been through together in this wonderful and bewildering country would be impossible, and would sound like a cliché -- we shared, we bonded, we fought, we commiserated, we adopted a cat together! But living in Phnom Penh can feel a bit like a vortex of suck sometimes, and I'm so happy I had her to share this experience with.

Last week at her going-away party

Her departure hasn't really hit me yet. This is the girl that introduced me to David Mitchell's genius! Her insight and intelligence was such an eye-opener for me and I'm so thankful that we are friends.

CBR5 #5 to #8: The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn go by incredibly quickly. The first four of the series – there are five total – all have titles that sound like exclamations of exasperation. Never Mind, the first novel, displays the home life of five-year-old Patrick Melrose, the son of an English aristocrat and an American heiress; Bad News follow’s 21-year-old Patrick, who’s now a heroin addict, and his drug-fuelled days in New York City when he goes to bury his father; Some Hope features him as an older, though not much wiser, man trying to come to terms with his past; and Mother’s Milk charts the summers that he and his family spend in the family’s home in France, and the declining health of his inattentive mother.

I’m gonna review them separately, even though they all came in one tome. I think this edition (where the four are actually one) was released right before the launch of St. Aubyn’s fifth and final book, which I have not read.

Never Mind

In the first book of the Patrick Melrose series, St. Aubyn introduces David Melrose, the patriarch of the Melrose family, through the eyes of others who seem eager to avoid him. His maid tries to skirt around his attention while his wife, Eleanor, often seems to stay very, very still so as not to have him notice her. Only five-year-old Patrick seems to appreciate his father, who he sees as a stern and commanding presence.

The other players in Never Mind is Jewish philosopher Victor Eisen and his reporter girlfriend Anne Moore; and Nicholas Pratt and his new young girlfriend Bridget. The three couples are meeting at the French house of David and Eleanor, and the entire book takes place in the span of a single day.

David Melrose, an English aristocratic, is seen as the top dog by all the men in terms of style and class, and all the men do verbal gymnastics around each other to try to appear clever and ironic, while also not overtly aggressive. St. Aubyn skewers the rich by portraying them as a malicious bunch – and all the ammunition is flung while they are sitting civilly to dinner. Eleanor, who is American and really the wealthy one as it is her inheritance that David and the family are living off of, often finds herself feeling left out:

Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how ‘boring’ it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness. When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own,and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game. The more she thought about this conflict, the more tightly it trapped her. She would never know what to say because whatever she said would be wrong.

The entire first book is beset with a sense of foreboding – David, as you can already tell, is a sadistic fucking dick; Eleanor is forever his victim; and Patrick – who Anne, at one point, says is the only person she likes in that family since there is still optimism in him – seems to be the vessel upon each parent’s cruelty and neuroses is spilled into.

I’m going to keep hammering on this throughout all the reviews for all four books, but St. Aubyn is unforgiving in his portrayal of the wealthy, and he manages to imbue all the characters and descriptions with such a richness of knowledge. Patrick, as a five-year-old, is largely exempt from such contempt, but his point of view is just as poignantly vivid, and it brought along a sense of almost nostalgia – I could remember feeling these emotions when my mother used to get angry at me, and I could not figure out the reasons behind her anger:

As Patrick slowly crossed the floor he tried to think of some way to placate his father. Maybe if he said something clever he’d be forgiven, but he felt extraordinarily stupid and could only think over and over: two time two equals four, two times two equals four. He tried to remember something he had noticed that morning, or anything, anything at all that might persuade his father that he had been ‘observing everything.’ But his mind was eclipsed by the shadow of his father’s presence.

Never Mind is really about the resignation of a child, at five, that things are just going to be shit for the rest of his life. His father is an asshole, his mother is a dishrag, and adults seem despicable through and through. Patrick’s world is split into half on this day with the knowledge that his parents, whom he had seen as model adults of sorts, could come to embody monsters.

Bad News

Bad news arrives in a phone call from an old family friend to Patrick, 21, as he is just about to expertly inject heroin into the crook of his arm – his father had passed away. Will Patrick stop by the funeral home on Madison Avenue in New York City?

Patrick put down the syringe he had been flushing out, and sat beside the phone without moving. Was it bad news? Perhaps he would need all his courage not to dance in the street, not to smile too broadly.

With that begins a two-day drug-fuelled existence in New York. Upon hearing about David’s death, Patrick resolves to quit using heroin. But in order to get himself off it, he’d have to distract himself with other substances – such as cocaine, quaaludes, speed, valium, and general overuse of alcohol. It doesn’t matter because he ends up using heroin anyway. In his quest to rid himself of the stench of having been fathered by a sadistic child rapist, Patrick seeks out his old “friends” – Pierre, his old dealer, a French man with the purest heroin available who scolds Patrick for always trying to seek a rush while selling it to him; and Willy, an Alphabet City dealer who is willing to invite Patrick over to his home and provide him with a much-sought-after needle.

Patrick also visits with old family friends and all in all, comes off as an entitled rich brat who is adept at having cynical conversations with “grown-ups.” It’s clear that no one knows to what extent David’s cruelty was inflicted upon Patrick; he continually has to hear others tell him what a singularly amazing man his father was.

The second book is probably my least favorite, because Patrick – while sympathetic if you had read Never Mind – is a real mess. That’s to be expected given his childhood, as well as the heroin addiction. But every time St. Aubyn seems about to redeem Patrick’s general shittiness, he’s assailed by a sudden need to be unkind or make an observation that can only be thought of as “Rich White Boy” with an eye roll.

One thing that I loved about it though was the hazy clarity that Patrick seemed to collapse into when under the influence of drugs. While reading this, all I could think was, “Holy Christ, St. Aubyn totally had a drug problem.” There was a realness to the addiction, like the way Patrick mapped out his night according to the drugs he had left, just to make sure he didn’t run out too long before his flight returning to London took off, but that he didn’t have too much whereby he’d be too high before boarding the plane. Patrick is also visited by hallucinations and voices, and there are whole pages that continue with conversations in his head with the television in his hotel room.

The whole experience made me really wish I knew what it was like to be high on heroin.

Another great thing about Bad News – you start noticing recurring characters in the Melroses’ life. Nicholas Pratt is mentioned again, and Anne returns, this time as an old friend who, despite her dislike for David, does not quite approve of Patrick’s vocal hatred toward his father. It’s sort of fun to note familiar names and recurring themes in these books – such as the appearance of an Alsatian, or a German shepherd, and how it symbolizes David’s restlessness and sudden anger.

Some Hope

I actually read Some Hope first, before I even knew that it was just one installment in a series of five. It begins with Patrick Melrose’s point of view after he had woken up from a dream, and while it may be random (especially if I came at it without having gone through Never Mind and Bad News) it was immediately gripping and interesting.

Patrick, at 28, has a singular voice and point of view. He is acerbic and humorous and self-lacerating. He is immature, sure – after all, he is a child of a trust fund and absent (slash abusive) parents – but as the chapters switch between his point of view and others within his social circle, it’s clear that the entire community of rich, well-to-doers are not even close to half as self-aware as he is.

Some Hope spans over a single day, and it’s essentially a look at various people’s lives as they prepare for a big party at night that will be thrown by Bridget (yes, young, flitty Bridget that we first saw in Never Mind) and her society husband for a princess. Patrick has been drug-free and sober for a couple years now, and his closest friend is Johnny, who seems like the most normal person in the entire book – and this is as an ex-heroin addict.

British snobbery is on full display here, with clever double-talk and the employment of crushing barbs in polite conversation. Every single person portrayed is a fucking bitch here – no one means what they say, and everything they say means nothing here because they would just twist it later when repeated to other parties. Yet St. Aubyn never makes a reader feel like that entire cast of character is a stain on humanity because we are able to see the humanness in all these deplorable characteristics. Because who hasn’t shit-talked a friend, and spoken behind their backs? And haven’t we all done it because we are all insecure in some ways, that we feel the need to crush others in our minds in order to feel good about ourselves? St. Aubyn just shows it off here to a greater, more extreme degree. 

The title this time refers to Patrick’s search for some sense of normalcy, in his mind. He is still struggling with his childhood abuse under the hands of his father, and how to reconcile it with the fact that David Melrose is greatly respected by Very Imporant People, people who never hesitate to tell Patrick what a great friend his pedophile father was to them.

If anything, the duality, and even the multiplicity, that exists within us has been a persistent theme throughout these novels. It’s trite to say, “Oh, he has characters that are not flat and are multi-dimensional.” Yes, it is a minimal requirement for an author to be able to expertly render his protagonist, and the people surrounding him, as a human being. But it’s an entirely different skill to make me seriously believe that these people are good and bad, and evil and kind; to hold these two opposing point of views at the same time in my mind. And truth be told, aren’t we all like this? I’m constantly questioning the intentions behind my actions and behind my motivations – do I do good things because I want to be good, or because I want to be perceived as good? It’s bad to gossip and shit talk and be snide, but isn’t it also just so clever to be a witty pessimist rather than an earnest do-gooder?

This was my favorite of the four books, and the one that prompted me to seek out the entire series (saving the final book, because I live in, you know, Cambodia/non-Amazon land). It works as a stand-alone book, but I re-read it anyway when I started from the beginning, if only because Patrick’s history makes me appreciate so much more the re-appearance of personalities from his past, as well as the effort it has taken for him to get to this point, where he can concretely say, “Well, maybe I could make my life about me, and not about having survived my father’s abuse.”

Mother’s Milk

The fourth book is a jarring departure from the other three. First, it is no longer set within a short period of time – it spans several summers from 2000 onwards – and also, it provides an extensive look to the people around Patrick. Now married and with a children, Patrick appears, at first to have settled comfortably into fatherhood and married life. Their summers, initially spent in the family house in France (in which Never Mind took place), were supplanted as Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, began giving the family fortune and property away to some New Age cult religion group.

St. Aubyn has focused so much on Patrick’s relationship with his absent parents – and we’ve only seen one very meek, very subservient side of his mother in Never Mind – that Eleanor’s reappearance and her portrayal is almost unrecognizable. Eleanor, after all, has always been a cipher for others to pin their hopes upon, and having each time failed their expectations, have flitted to her next goal, whether if it is being a good wife (failed), a good mother (failed failed), altruistic Mother-to-the-People (sort of failed, but who knows), and an upright Human Being Who Submits Herself to a Higher Power (failed because it’s essentially a cult she entrusts her hopes upon).

St. Aubyn juxtaposes Patrick’s neurosis and self-awareness upon the reflections of his young and precocious son – who is trying his best to emulate his father -- and his wife, who is the extreme opposite of Eleanor. This self-awareness that Patrick has carried throughout his life has now been taken up to a greater degree by his older son, Robert.

And Robert is… an anomaly. As a child, he possesses an intelligence that I sincerely doubt is possible in real life, but always seem to appear in the children of movies and books. Yet St. Aubyn does the very clever trick of having Robert’s inner thoughts seem extremely insightful and probing, while from the outside point of view have him engaging in play and childish acts. And truthfully, haven’t we all felt like this as a kid? The belief that what the adult sees is only a fraction of my capacity as a child? I remember thinking, perhaps around 5, that adults vastly underestimate children and their ability to understand that they’re just so full of shit. So maybe Robert’s portrayal isn’t that far off – it’s just more eloquently written.

For Patrick, Eleanor’s gradual descent into old age has him feeling a curious mix of hatred, compassion and resentment. How hard should he be pushing her for a slice of the family inheritance? Should he even care about it, considering how much he does not love her as a mother? If she asks for his help in killing herself, should he do it because he loves her and wants to put her out of her misery… or does he want to do it because there’s the glee of revenge that comes from a lifetime of familial betrayal? Any time you begin to judge Patrick’s motivations for his urges, don’t worry – he’s already gotten there and ran three laps around the park with them.

It’s sort of interesting, now that I am writing about these books, to clearly see how St. Aubyn has brought Patrick’s character to a full growth. In the first, he unfailingly loves his father and mother, and his world is shattered in a single day. In the second, Patrick encapsulates the rich young asshole who sees the world as being preternaturally against him and therefore he must try to shorten his life as quickly as possible through substance-abuse. And then in Some Hope, he’s taken the rashness of his youth, and is trying so hard to push life forward with an attempt at maturity. Finally, in Mother’s Milk, he’s reduced to his former child when it comes Eleanor and his wife Mary – playing the blame game – but he tries to emulate adulthood by rationalizing his reasons and putting his feelings up for full inspection.

It’s exhausting to watch, exhausting to experience, and exhilarating to have on page to see. Not only is it amazing writing, but St. Aubyn’s portrayal of Patrick just pulled so much empathy from me – the specific details of his circumstances may differ (greatly differ) from my life, but I completely saw so much of Patrick within me and his over-thinking his over-thinking touched my soul.

What a fucking corny way to end a review, huh? Well, I cannot recommend the Patrick Melrose novels enough – it’s brilliant, it’s funny, it’s painful and it will speak to you in volumes about what kind of people we individuals are. Go. Go read it, now. 

CBR5 #4: A Storm of Swords (Part 2) by George R.R. Martin

For the longest time, I didn't realize that the third book for A Song of Ice and Fire was divided into two parts. I finished Part 1 last year, began watching the third season of Game of Thrones, and was just completely perplexed about why the plot seemed so different from what I read.

Anyway, I wised up and quickly finished Part 2 in the middle of the third season. Since the books hew pretty close to the HBO series, anyone who is not up with the books and wish not to be spoiled should probably avoid this review -- which, admittedly, is going to be pretty brief.

Where to start, where to start...

Tyrion, my favorite character, is not having a very good time -- his face is pretty ugly, which bums him out; his wife, Sansa Stark, won't speak to him like a real person nor will she allow him to touch her; and his sister really hates him. Joffrey, his nephew, has continued to antagonize him, going so far as to hire dwarves for his wedding to Margary Tyrell to act like fools.

Meanwhile, over in the far North, my least favorite good character, Jon Snow, is just all sorts of conflicted, as is usual with his 13-year-old state of mind. He's  gotten in with the wildlings (and in the pants of Ygritte) but after they crossed the wall, he betrayed them and has now began a defense against them with his Black Brothers. However, the higher-ups, like that Janos Slynt from King's Landing (slimiest of slime balls who will can be trusted about as far as one can sling a piano) are beginning to question his loyalty to the Brothers. This comes in the midst of choosing a new commander since Lord Mormont was killed in Craster's Keep.

And now Arya! Arya manages to escape the Brotherhood and into the arms of the Hound, who is determined to try and ransom her off to her mother or some distant relative for gold. Sandor Clegane is fast becoming one of my favorite "bad" characters -- when questioned about his goodness, Clegane flings back insults to his accusers cast-the-first-stone style. This brings into stark relief how truly violent and awful George R.R. Martin's universe is, where even those who are considered good would be willing to kill and fight for "honor."

As for Daenerys, she's still trying to raise forces to reclaim the Iron Throne, but she is now stuck in the East, being called Mother for freeing the slave cities. It appears that most of the time, she is batting away sexist insults from her challengers while wearing dresses where her breasts hang out, or she's oogling Daario, a Braavosi who has sworn his allegiance to her who is apparently really handsome to her but sound like a rainbow oompa loompa on page. The loyalty of two of her advisers, Jorah Mormont and Arstan Whitebeard, is thrown into questions and Dany is all conflicted about who she can trust.

Do I have to describe the trials and tribulations of all the characters with chapters? The Wiki page will probably do a better job than I did. Obviously, I enjoy these books, and will continue to read them, but to be honest, recapping them here is really difficult. I encountered the same problem when I was recapping the Chaos Trilogy or the Hunger Games Trilogy, in the sense that these series are so immensely popular that it feels like everyone already loves them and exalts them, but since it is only a single part in a series, then my descriptions might spoil it for people who had not read it before.

It's doubly difficult with the Song of Ice and Fire books because I am reading them so concurrently with watching the HBO series that I have them kind of mixed up in my mind. I also only see the characters the way the actors portray them -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing since the TV series follow the books so closely.

CBR5 #3: World War Z by Max Brooks

So the movie for this is coming out (or is it out already? Living abroad leaves me no sense of pop cultural happenings) and I thought I should finally read the copy that has been sitting in my book shelf for the last year and a half. I finished this back in March, so my memory of the book's details is a bit hazy, and my retelling of it may not be wholly accurate, but I'm gonna try my best.

I love zombie movies -- I think they are fun and weirdly campy in its horror, and the statement zombie movies are often trying to make is always so hit-you-over-the-head obvious that I enjoy the effort put into trying to diversify the message. But I've never read a zombie book. And World War Z is a pretty awesome beginning, I'd say, to changing the way I can appreciate how the zombie genre has evolved. 

It's essentially a series of oral accounts, put together by a government chronicler, to map out the zombie war that ate the Earth raw for about 10 years. It begins with how the zombie pandemic may have started -- in China, of course -- through the eyes of a Chinese doctor who saw how a young patient had been transformed after he was bitten and had to be tied down with rope to prevent him from hurting others. And then Brooks' chronicler goes into accounts of how it could have spread -- first by the Chinese government's refusal to tell other governments about the zombie pandemic, and then with the governments' ineptitude to secure its borders to the flood of fleeing non-bitten, and sometimes already-bitten humans. There was also an organ trade that could have spread the pandemic further. Scientists' recommendations on how to contain the infestation are ignored, making the problem worse. 

From the account of the female war pilot who crash-landed in an area filled with zombies, to the account of the rich Hollywood-type who said he had built his mansion-fortress up to keep in the rich and famous and allow the poor to die outside; to the Japanese youth, who lived in his own world plugged into the cybers, unaware that the apocalypse was upon him until it was literally upon him -- the richness in details about the ineptitude of governments, the stringent viewpoints of the military in dealing with an unknown and indefatigable enemy -- this book made me wonder how our global leaders would ever be able to deal with a real pandemic should something to this scale ever occur. 

I do wish I had written this review sooner so that I could do the book more justice. The truth is that I started reading it with the thought that it was going to be fun and amusing, like a zombie movie. And yes, it was, but midway through it, the clarity that Brooks imbued in his narrative account just brought to stark light how real this all could be, and I just got more horrified as it progressed. World War Z should be read, not as fiction, but as a parable. 

So I disappeared for a bit...

2013 was a bit of a shit year, to be honest. After I read and reviewed Ghostwritten, my life sort of went down the rabbit hole. My boyfriend and I broke up -- we were in a long-distance relationship, so the absence shouldn't have mattered so much, right? Even so.

So I disappeared for a bit, and I stopped reading, and I stopped reviewing. I found it difficult to sit still by myself with my thoughts, and so I was just running around, doing as much as I possibly could. I went to Kep on weekends with new friends, went to Jakarta on another weekend to visit an old friend. I started cooking again, this time trying to make Chinese-style noodles (hor fun), or pierogis, or just meals that consisted of the four food groups. I adopted a kitten and named him Biggie Smalls. I fought with friends, made up with friends, said goodbye to friends. I went to new places, new events that I wouldn't have bothered with six months ago, and I met up with old friends who visited Phnom Penh. I bought a nice camera and (somewhat) learned how to use it. 

First day in Jakarta

Jakarta city-view

Parts of the city were waterlogged when I was there. 

But people still seemed positively cheerful 

With Christi and her boyfriend, hanging outside in the balcony

Biggie Smalls, when he was very small

Biggie Smalls, two months later. Dude got huge!

My pierogis. I was very proud of 'em. 

Jane and I looking like hot bitches on our way to a classical music concert (Photo by Ben Woods*)

At the night market with friends (Photo by Ben Woods)

Always at Liquid. Etan (third from left) visited me in Phnom Penh for about 48 hours. (Photo by Ben Woods)

And this was all while working my ass off at my job, which is utterly life-consuming in some ways. Work was a relief during this time. I complain about it a lot, but I do love it. 

In March, I returned to the States for a month for Cynthia's wedding. It was beautiful, of course, and it was great seeing her again. Talking to her always feels like such a relief, like nothing's ever going to change between us and that if there's one thing that I can rely on to be constant in my life, it's my friendship with her. Her husband, Chris, was very sweet, very funny, and loves her very much (obvi), and I, naturally, think that he's lucky to have found a woman like Cynthia.

We don't like each other. 

Puppies kissing Cynthia before the ceremony

Cynthia walks down the aisle with her father

I also got to spend some time with my mother. We took a trip to central California, to Solvang, and its surrounding towns. This place was like weird farm central. We went to an ostrich farm, a miniature horse farm, a miniature donkey farm and a lavender farm. My mom also accompanied me to a beer brewery, called Figueroa Mountain Brewery.

miniature ponies!

miniature donkeys! (This one was sweet)

The donkey was trying to get my mom to pet him. 

Ostriches are fucking freakish looking. Also ginormous, and have huge talons. 

Then New York, which was exhilarating and exhausting. I stayed with Marissa, and just had a schedule full of seeing family, friends, mentors, and former colleagues. I drank way too much beer, ate way too much good food, and spent... not as much money as I expected, which was a nice surprise given how expensive the city can be. But I guess since I was visiting from Cambodia, everyone seemed to want buy me lunch, dinner, drinks. I also got to go to a concert in Bushwick, which made me so happy. Haven't heard live music in ages. The band was Crushed Out aka Boom Chick -- a drum/guitar duo. They were great.

View of uptown from my uncle's office. He works near WTC.

My cousin. She got so big! And understands words now. 

I meet the Polish hotties in the East Village.

I miss these girls so much. 

got a hipster card from the girls

Last week, May 3, was my two-year anniversary in Cambodia with Emily. We didn't do much -- just had sushi for dinner to commemorate it, then went out drinking with a buddy who was back in town.

Two years in Cambodia. Nuts.

Anyway, it's been a pretty eventful four months. I'm glad that I was more willing to put myself out there and do different things, but obviously there have been some down sides to being unwilling to settle down and allow myself to be ok with just. sitting. still. But I'm trying, right now, I really, really am. I've even started reading again -- besides that Ron Vitale book I reviewed below, I've read three other books. I'm aware that puts me way behind my CBR5 goal of 26, but I'll keep trying.

(*My friend, Ben, has more photos of Phnom Penh at his tumblr. He's a great photographer.)

CBR5 #2: Cinderella's Secret Diary: Lost

We often dismiss the young adult genre as being filled with a lot of trash and cliches, but I believe that being able to write a good YA novel is an underappreciated art. Some of the books that I call my Favorites of All Time are from this genre. If it's written well, and is able to posit some great ideas, these books can go on to shape young people's minds. The Golden Compass (and the entire Dark Material trilogy, for that matter) was an eye-opening experience that made me realize that adults might not always have your best interests at heart, or they think they do, but they really don't know what they are doing.

Of course, we can't hold Phillip Pullman's masterpiece up as a yardstick for every YA novel, because if we do, then everything else basically pales in comparison. But there are other enjoyable and important YA novels of a much smaller scale that I hold dear to my heart. The Giver by Lois Lowry, everything Roald Dahl has written (The Witches scared the shit out of me as a kid), The Girl with Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts (This one is not amazing and not a classic, but as a kid, it really spoke to me). 

And herein I arrive at my point: One does not have to aim for the stars to be a great YA writer but one should not condescend to their young readers either. 

And for Ron Vitale's Cinderella's Secret Diary: Lost, the mark was missed on several counts. This was provided to CBR5 readers as a free e-read, which I am so appreciative for. I can only imagine what it's like to be writer -- it actually gives me a bit of a panic attack to think about putting my work out there in to the masses to judge and criticize... gah, panic attack. (Yes, I am a reporter for a daily newspaper, but that's totally different.) But we're encouraged to blog about these free e-reads, and also told to write how we really feel so... here goes. 

Lost is a retelling of Cinderella's story -- a "After Happily Ever After" of sorts. It's written as a dairy from Cinderella to her fairy godmother, maybe about five years after she and the prince got married. In the beginning, Cinderella is pleading for her fairy godmother to come to her and help her because she is unhappy: her prince seems disinterested in their marriage, she is unable to conceive and she feels like a bit lost in her life. The diary serves as a means to communicating with her godmother, and sure enough, after a few entries, there are responses that the godmother magicked into the diary for Cinderella to read. Eventually, Cinderella begins on this journey that leads to her eventually "finding herself." 

There are several issues with Lost. The first and foremost is the writing. It's bad. It is written in the most bland manner possible -- I'm not saying that writing has to be flowery to be amazing (look at Cormack McCarthy, whose writing is basically the most stripped down and concise, but delivers such an emotional punch). If Cinderella is feeling happy, she says she's happy. If she's sad, she says she's sad. I found it difficult to get a real sense of the character behind these words, which translated no emotion. There are also issues with phrasing and paragraphs that can be very jarring to a reader if they are not done well (and that we don't notice in books because these things usually go through a rigorous edit by a second or third person). 

Throughout the book, I kept thinking, "Well, maybe this is realistic. In my real diary, I probably wouldn't be using incredible language and diction and paying attention to syntax as I just whine my feelings out." But here is the second issue -- the diary platform that Vitale chose for his book. I personally think it's one of the laziest way of conveying a story. It's really a crutch that authors use to try and get straight to the voice of the main character. When it's done well, it can be amazing (Think The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I have personally never read, but everyone else seems to love) but it's so rare when that happens, and in Lost, it just comes across as thoughtless.

There is, however, one part in the book, where the fairy godmother is writing back to Cinderella and she said (I'm gonna paraphrase), "Your letters to me do not tell the full story. I saw you in your room last night and you were so broken up, I thought my heart was going to break." Something to that effect. And I thought, Oh, ok, maybe Vitale is holding back emotion on purpose, as like a character trait of Cinderella. 

But it's not worth it. It isn't. Because the writing is so soulless, I found it difficult to get through the plot or even to care. There were some surprises throughout the story, but it was hard to get invested at any point. Vitale had also inserted historical details throughout the book to let us know what time period this is taking place, but these details just frustrated me even more. If he took the time to think these details through to put it in his story, why couldn't he had thought his story through? Or taken more time with the writing? Or given more depth to his characters?

One of my favorite retellings of Cinderella was also a YA book -- Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. In that, there was a girl worth rooting for, a plot worth sitting through, and characters worth getting invested in. I wouldn't consider that book a stroke of great literary genius -- and looking back at the free preview on Amazon now, the writing isn't even that exemplary -- but it was still amazing, because Ella was made real to us. Sophia (as Cinderella's real name was in Lost) was just a cipher. 

(We were also given the sequel, Stolen, but I'm not gonna read that.) 

Cali shots

For Cynthia's wedding, I took a month off from work. Stopping over in California for two weeks, I managed to take a lot of photos (because I was so goddamn bored there). I also briefly considered on starting photo project of all the cul de sacs in our stupid, boring little town, but my lack of driving skills put an end to it. 

Nevertheless, here are some of northern Cali, where it was only about 10 degrees warmer than snowy New York, where I stopped in for two weeks as well

Cul de sac

Same cul de sac, different settings

Even my cat was bored

Nothing says suburban ennui like skateboarders in an empty park

I skateboarded too!

Word.

Sun setting

I went to San Francisco for a day to meet up with friends

I know these three from three different groups of friends. It was awesome to have them together.

Walking to Delores Park with beers to hang out

attempting close-ups

lavender shoes

Once I got to New York, I barely took any photos just because I got so busy.