Mr. and Meatless

source

We read The Thirteenth Tale for book club two months ago (yes, I’m a little behind writing the review. That’s  just me. I’m learning to accept it; you should too), and I think we all agreed we enjoyed it, but we also seemed to agree that it was….quirky.

The story is about an amateur biographer, Margaret Lea, who is hired by a famous author, Vida Winter, to write her life’s story before she passes away. It travels from present time to Vida’s childhood and back throughout the book, chronicling the ins and outs of Ms. Winters’ troubled childhood growing up in a rural English manor house and the family secrets that made her the person she became. For the sake of giving away too many details about the book, I’m going to leave the description at that. If you need more info, feel free to visit Goodreads.

The hardest thing for me about this book was my inability to really grasp the characters in present time. Margaret is troubled, melancholy and has potential to be very interesting, but she seems to fall a bit flat to me. Likewise, Ms. Winter has moments where she becomes very interesting, but just as I was starting to feel a connection to her or some sympathy for her, the author snapped to a different direction, leaving that bit of feeling hanging in the wind.

I have a hard time really describing my feelings about this book. I felt very compelled to continue picking it up, continue devouring the story, but at the same time, I felt continuously disappointed. And sad. It was truly a sad story. Each character either died or lost everything that meant something to them…or both. And at times it was hard to follow exactly what was going on in the story. There were a lot of instances where you simply had to assume that what you thought was happening actually was happening. There wasn’t always confirmation in the following sentences or chapters.

Overall, I’m glad I read this book. I’d been wanting to read it, and now I can say that I have. I won’t say it changed my life or gave me a new perspective on the world or on literature or anything like that, but it was entertaining enough to get me from start to finish without giving up.

Don’t you hate when you read a book, especially a long one, and you’re loving it; it’s so amazingly holding your attention that you can barely put it down, and then you get to the end and it totally flops? Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was that book.

It’s a story about marriage at its rockiest. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy moves girl from NYC to dying Mississippi river town. Girl hates it. One day girl disappears.

As I said before, the story starts out well. I was compelled to pick it up any chance I got just to see what happened next. In the first section of the book, you aren’t sure what happened to her. Is she still alive? Did her husband kill her? Did she run away? Did someone kidnap her? So many unanswered questions. I found myself unsure of who I was rooting for. You know what I mean, right? There’s two sides, of course, and its usually easy enough to decide whose team you’re on. But I found myself going back and forth the entire way through this book. I couldn’t predict how it was going to turn out or who would “win.”

But then, at the end of the first section, you get the big answer. You know what happened to her. And you’re compelled to continue reading to figure out how the heck she’s going to get out of the mess she’s in. Because she is in a big mess. And he’s in a big mess too. And all the little pieces unravel and squirm toward the end. And then, it just dies. No closure, one giant loose end just floating around out there. It’s like it was hurling full speed toward a giant cliff and instead of something miraculous happening, it just falls of the edge.

I contemplated writing a further review below, but I don’t think I want to. I don’t think its worth my time because I’m kind of over being pissed off at this book. If you’d like to have a chat about it, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll go to town on it.

Other than that, I do NOT recommend this book.

Has anyone else read this? Did you have a different opinion?

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not, but I’m in two different book clubs. And as such, I figured I’d start sharing my opinions of the books we read with you.

As I mentioned in a previous post, in one of my book clubs, we read Under the Tuscan Sun for our June meeting.

amazon.com

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. It was written like a journal of sorts because the author took the content from a notebook that she kept beginning when she and her boyfriend, Ed, purchased the house in Tuscany. That being said, there was no plot, no storyline. It was simply a collection of thoughts, observations, recipes and tidbits from the experiences the author had purchasing, remodeling and spending summers at a house in Tuscany.

There were parts I really enjoyed. The book evoked in me a desire to experience life in another country, a completely different culture, a simpler way of life. It also made me consider the merit in cooking simply, eating in season and instilled in me a strong desire to grow an herb garden.

On the other hand, I wished there were some photos of the house, a floor plan maybe, some before and after photos of the things that were changed. There were parts of the book where I had a very hard time visualizing what she was writing about. At the end, there’s a whole chapter about taking up the floor and there being layers and layers of stone below it. I just couldn’t picture it. I ended up skimming the chapter because if I can’t see it in my head, the words are just words.

There wasn’t a lot of dialogue, and I found that left something lacking. I had a hard time relating to the author. There was very little about her life, about her personality, about who she really was. Pair that with the fact that she obviously has unending wealth (buying a house in Tuscany, spending a ton of money to fix it up and then flying there twice a year…she can’t be simply “getting by”) and it was entirely impossible to relate to her. I didn’t feel for her, I couldn’t see the world through her eyes, and I couldn’t imagine what it might be like to be her. If you ask me, these things are crucial to really being able to enjoy a book.

So overall, I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone. Someone in our group asked “Did this book make you want to go to Italy?” I can’t say that it did. In fact, I think, based on the book, my opinion and desire to visit the country has lessened. Of course that’s not to say I wouldn’t go given the opportunity or that it’s no longer on my list of places I’d like to visit. It just didn’t strengthen my desire like I would have expected a first-hand depiction would have.