Let's Bust a Recap : Just One Damned Thing After Another

Remember last year when I confessed that after a quick trip down to Florida, I came home with thirty books after visiting some of my favorite secondhand bookstores? 

Just One Damned Thing After Another was one of them. I was browsing the shelves at (you guessed it) The Book Shelter and that title popped out at me. I had never heard of it or the author Jodi Taylor, but you can't just pass by a spine like that without at least seeing what it's about. And when I turned it over and the first thing I read in big bold print was "the bestselling British madcap time-travelling series that seems to be everyone's cup of tea", then flipped open the front cover and saw that in place of a dedication, Jodi Taylor had written, "I made all this up. Historians and physicists—please don't spit on me in the street."—I decided it needed to come home with me. After reviewing the open slots on my bingo card, it was the obvious choice for "an impulse buy" and I found myself reading it at the end of the year. 

Unfortunately, it was a flop. 

According to the back cover: "Jodi Taylor is, and always has been, a history nut. Her Chronicles of St. Mary's, a wild mix of history, adventure, comedy, romance, tragedy, and anything else the author could think of, began as a self-published book called Just One Damned Thing After Another. It's now a bestselling, wildly addictive series." I had a hard time finding anything about the publication history of this book on the internet, but it's copyrighted 2013 in my edition and was published by Night Shade Books. I'm not sure what journey it took between its self-published beginnings to now being a twelve book series with the thirteenth book set to come out this summer, and I'm equally unsure how the term "addictive" could be applied to it, but apparently Jodi Taylor has found her audience. I'm just not in it.

So what's it about? Hard to say. Let me refer again to the back cover: "The Chronicles of St. Mary's tells the chaotic adventures of Max and her compatriots—Doctor Bairstow, Chief Leon Farrell, Mr. Markham, and many more—as they travel through time, saving St. Mary's (too often by the very seat of their pants) and thwarting time-travelling terrorists, all the while leaving plenty of time for tea. From eleventh-century London, to World War I, from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, one thing is for sure: wherever the historians at St. Mary's go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake."

And, in fact, "chaotic" is the perfect word to describe this book. The plot (if you can call it that) is muddled at best, the multitude of characters unmemorable and nearly impossible to keep track of (I eventually just put a bookmark in the character list at the front because I was flipping back to it nearly every time a character's name was mentioned), and the writing was just bad (it did seem like the author shoved in every possible thing she could think of). Taylor definitely has a gift for humor, but this book would need a serious overhaul from a fantastic editor to make it worthwhile. Any kind of meaningful development was entirely nonexistent. At one point, Max referenced the fact that she'd been at St. Mary's for five years. If you had asked me how much time I thought had passed, I would have said only a few months. The "romance" is so out of left-field it comes as more of a shock than anything. And at no point did I ever feel even a hint of sadness when a character died. It just wasn't great. 

One would hope that the writing improves as the series continues, but that's not a rabbit-hole I'll be falling down any time soon. 

The tl;dr version: fun premise, poor execution. 

Have you heard of this series? If yes, are you a fan?

Let's Bust a Recap : The Joy Luck Club

Okay, so here's the thing: this book is bitter. And I'm having a hard time figuring out how to start this recap. So head out to left field with me and we'll see if we can't circle around to it.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is on all those must-read lists I like so much. But the first time I remember really cataloguing this title away in my brain library was a few years ago when a girl I knew in college started blogging about books. She listed this in her Top 5 Favorite Fictional Books EVER, and when I read that, I mentally filed it away as one to look out for. About a year after her post, Cody and I made our maiden voyage into The Book Shelter and this book came home in our stack. 

Fast forward about three and a half years and now I'm in a book club with some of my best friends. When they visited me up in NC last summer, this book on my shelf by AMY Tan caught my friend AMY's eye. While we were out and about downtown, she picked it up at a thrift store for like a quarter, and subsequently chose it as her next selection for our book club. 

So last September found me reading this collection of sixteen essays or short stories about four Chinese women, their American-born daughters, and the complicated relationships they all have with each other. The Joy Luck Club published in 1989 is the debut novel of Amy Tan, herself the American-born daughter of her Chinese immigrant mother, and it is the work she is still best known for despite having written five additional novels, a couple of children's books, and some non-fiction into the mix as well. In The Joy Luck Club, we are first introduced to Jing-Mei "June" Woo whose mother has recently passed away. Jing-Mei has been asked by her father to fill in her mother's spot at the Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese women founded by Jing-Mei's mother in 1949 who get together to play mahjong. 

This book was a hard one for me. I thought the structure was really interesting, and I found the interlocking stories and shifting perspectives intriguing as well as challenging. I did a LOT of flipping back and forth to make sure I was connecting the right daughter with the right mother. The book is divided into four section, and each section has four stories. The first and last sections are the mothers' stories, the middle sections are the daughters' stories. I found the language really beautiful and thought the book was exceptionally well written. The imagery is very rich, and I definitely felt exposed to a lot of aspects of Chinese culture as I read it (though Tan has been criticized from some for her depiction of Chinese culture). I could probably read this book a hundred times and still not fully appreciate all the symbolism Tan employs to tell each woman's story.

But is this a book I would want to read one hundred times? I don't think so. As I said to start this recap, the word that comes to mind when I think of The Joy Luck Club is "bitter". I found it so harsh, and the fractured relationships between these mothers and daughters left me heartsick. While there was some attempt at communication and relationship-building between some of our characters, we have to wade through a lot of miserable life circumstances and the consequences of years of poor choices to get to even a glimmer of hope. Just as these stories are interconnected while being distinct, so these mothers, while connected to their daughters, seem to be cut off from them. It was really hard to read even while being really beautiful. While this is a book I might see myself revisiting at some point in the future, it is by no means one I would turn to again and again. While The Joy Luck Club undoubtedly is the type of book that lends itself to re-reading for a better grasp at understanding it, it would be hard for me to knowingly subject myself to that kind of trauma again. It's a book I would recommend, but wouldn't recommend. 

How's that for a recap? Have you read The Joy Luck Club or any of Tan's other work? Have you ever read a book that was traumatic while still somehow retaining beauty?

Let's Bust a Recap : Measure for Measure

Well, it's high time for some more Shakespeare around here and this year's choice for a comedy was Measure for Measure though this turned out to be another of Shakespeare's "problem plays" meaning it read more tragic than comedic. As I got deeper and deeper into the madness, I felt like Measure for Measure was a definite tragedy on par with Othello, but I guess since no one dies in the end, the First Folio people gave it the comedy stamp and so it remains to this day.

We open upon Duke Vincentio of Vienna cutting out and leaving the kingdom in the self-righteous iron fists of Angelo. Apparently, Vincentio has let things go to pot and Angelo has taken it upon himself to restore order starting with arresting Claudio and sentencing him to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant. 

Only Claudio is actually a pretty upstanding guy and everyone is outraged that he's on death row. Vienna is one big party town and unlike most of the philandering men around the block, Claudio is a one-woman man and the only reason Juliet isn't already his wife is because of a legal technicality. Like, basically they're just waiting on the paperwork to clear. 

When Claudio's friend Lucio finds out what's happened, he rushes off to find Claudio's sister Isabella who is in a convent on the brink of becoming a full-fledged nun. He begs her to go to Angelo and get her brother off the hook. Why Isabella is the only qualified candidate for this job, I'm still not sure, but away she goes to try to talk sense into Angelo.

She and Angelo get into it, and evidently, Isabella is so super-fine that Angelo can barely contain himself and by the end of their debate, he tells Isabella that he'll let Claudio off and lasso her the moon and anything else she wants if she'll just sleep with him one time. 

You see what's happening here, right? He's got Claudio going to the chopping block for the very crime that he's all hot and heavy to commit with Isabella. 

Isabella tells him exactly what he can do to himself and threatens to out him to the entire city; Angelo responds by totally gaslighting her. Because who's going to believe this little girl over Mr. Law-and-Order?

What a scumbag.

Isabella heads straight to her brother in jail and is all, "My dude, say your prayers and man up to meet your Maker because I would rather die myself than give up my innocence." To which Claudio is all, "No doubt, I would kill that guy myself if I wasn't locked up." But after two more seconds changes his tune to, "Would it really be the worst thing?" And Isabella is all, "Get ahold of yourself!"

Meanwhile, some random friar that's been skulking around town and hanging out in the jail overhears everything and takes Isabella aside for a chat. But is it really a random friar? Of course not. It's Duke Vincentio in disguise because he never had any business to attend to out of town. He just wanted to shake off the yoke of responsibility for a while and let Angelo mete out some justice of biblical proportions while he watches undercover, I guess. 

So he pulls Isabella aside and tells her that she should go back to Angelo and agree to do the nasty with him as long as he consents to meet her in the dead of night and keep his mouth shut the whole time. To which Isabella replies, "Does anyone even know what a conscience is?" And then Friar Duke is all, "No, no; we'll send this chick Mariana who's in love with Angelo." And Isabella is all, "Seriously? I wouldn't send any other woman to degrade herself in this way either." But then Friar Duke explains that Mariana is actually Angelo's fiancée and he owes it to her to marry her but has declined to fulfill his commitment ever since her dowry was lost at sea. So Isabella's like, "Oh, I guess it's fine then."

What?!

So Mariana goes off and has her little incognito fling with Angelo.

But then Angelo sends a message to the prison ordering Claudio's execution to commence immediately.

MEGA-SCUMBAG.

When Friar Duke gets word of this, he then concocts a plan to execute some other poor schmuck who looks like Claudio and send his head to Angelo instead. Which they do. And then he tells Isabella (who thinks her brother was just beheaded) and Mariana (who just entrapped Angelo) to go plead their case to the Duke (aka HIMSELF) who's arriving back in town any minute. 

He then does a quick wardrobe change and makes his grand entrance into Vienna. So now we've got a nice little audience for Isabella and Mariana to rat out Sir Scumbag. They air their grievances and Angelo is all, "They're both crazy." And Duke Vincentio is like, "Unless you can present this friar, you're both liars."

At which point of the play I am absolutely raging. 

The duke ducks back out and changes back into his friar disguise so he can come back in and verify everything the girls said. To which Angelo is still like, "Why should anyone believe you?" And then Duke Vincentio pulls of his mask and is all, "Gotcha, sucker."

You'd think that right about now we'd string Angelo up the nearest pole, right?

You'd be wrong. Because he gets to live and be married to Mariana, Claudio shows up (to Isabella's profound gratitude) and gets to live happily ever after with Juliet, and Duke Vincentio ups and proposes marriage to Isabella.

No. NO. NO. No.

First of all, I'm so over Shakespeare's mindless, thirsty women who still want the most despicable men even after those men spit in their very faces. Second of all, Angelo should have burned at the stake. He is so gross.

Isabella does not answer Duke Vincentio's marriage proposal. There's a scripted silence which a lot of people interpret to mean she accepts him, but for the sake of my sanity, I have to believe she turns up her nose, marches her little behind back to the convent, and becomes a nun for the rest of her days. SHE HAS TO, RIGHT?

The only truly comedic elements of this play were the little exchanges between Lucio and the duke wherein Lucio is unwittingly bashing the duke to his face while he's disguised as the friar, and then dogs on the friar to the duke not realizing they're the same person—that's funny. Duke Vincentio ultimately "punishes" him by sentencing him to marry some prostitute he knocked up—ummm, not quite as funny. 

Y'all. I just can't. Like I said at the beginning, this one was a tragedy for me. It made me more mad than Othello, and I could still spit tacks over that abominable ending. Angelo is the worst, Duke Vincentio not much better, and Mariana is on a level with Helena of women who could do better and ought to know it. Geez.

Personally, I'd call this one of Shakespeare's more compelling plays, but don't read it if you're not ready to rail against the universe for a little while. Hopefully next year's comedy will furnish a few more laughs.