Slacks for Ella Funt

A quick, fun read with the benefit of the characters being Australian, so I could imagine them talking in Australian accents. However, if I had seen this in a bookstore instead of online, there’s no way I would have bought it. The packaging is awful—a pretty lame cover and badly printed on bright white text paper. Also, the back ad copy is atrocious—just because shallow YA books sell well doesn’t mean that books with characters that aren’t vapid need cover copy that sounds like they are.

I had intended to read this for a while, because I like to read books set in boarding schools. Reading this book me think about Atonement, by Ian McEwan. While it’s a completely different story, it’s about a lot of the same things: narrative truth and the nature of being a writer. I didn’t think it was as effective as Atonement, primarily because the twist ending in Old School is no surprise, unlike Atonement, where the ending felt like a slap in the face. Old School also features “cameo” appearances by other writers—Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemingway—some flattering and some unflattering.

I reread this in preparation for reading her new book, One Good Turn, which is sort of a sequel. The first time I read it was primarily on a long uncomfortable train ride. I was looking to be distracted, preferrably by something that wouldn’t challenge me much. A mystery. So I read Case Histories as a mystery and was a little let down. It doesn’t have the rapid plot twists and surprise ending that most of the best genre mysteries have. All the answers are pretty obvious with a third of the book left to go and who dunnit isn’t really the point.

Reading it again, I started with different expectations and read it as a literary novel. It held up much better this way. Atkinson’s characters are very real and richly developed, in a way that characters in mysteries generally are not. The novel develops through the deepening understanding of the characters, how they perceive themselves and are perceived, rather than the action of the plot. Thus the revelations at the end are of new perspectives on characters, rather than the solving of the crimes.

This was a weekend full of projects and parties. In our living room, the ugly air conditioner is the visual focal point of the room, between the two windows and above our tv. I bought some marimekko fabric a year ago intending to make a stretched canvas to cover it, but I never got around to it and then it got to be summer and we were using the air conditioner. This year I was determined to get it done. E used his art school skills to stretch the fabric on a huge frame and we got it hung. It floats a few inches away from the wall because the air conditioner sticks out behind it, but I think the floating looks kind of cool and design-y.

I also did my annual Christmas cookie making this weekend. I had to make springerle, which are a traditional family cookie. They’re flavored with anise and you roll them out with a special rolling pin to put patterns on them. I also made gingerbread men, which E decorated with raisin genitalia. And oatmeal raisin cookies, because I love my oatmeal raisin cookies.

When we weren’t making things, we were going to parties. We went to one holiday party Saturday night, a birthday brunch Sunday morning, and then two more holiday parties Saturday night. We had a lot of fun, but we were definitely tired by the end of the weekend.

Luckily, we received this year’s fruit basket from one of my vendors in much better shape than last year’s. Last year, I forgot to tell him I had moved, so the fruit basket sat in its box for a couple months at E’s old place before we discovered it. Needless to say, it didn’t look so good. Which didn’t stop us from digging out the bottle of cheap champagne and washing off the mold. The basket is much more attractive when it doesn’t look like a science experiment.
We decorated our Christmas tree over the weekend. Somehow, even though I bought two more strands of lights for this year’s tree, we still ran out when we got to the top. Our tree will just have to be a little brighter at the bottom. I am quite pleased with it and we had a good time decorating it, drinking mulled cider and eggnog, and watching Bad Santa. I even finished the tree skirt this year that I started and left unfinished last year.

I went about reading David Mitchell books backward. I read Black Swan Green last spring, before I read Cloud Atlas. When Cloud Atlas came out, I thought it would be one of those overly long postmodern things that E likes so much and I’m not so crazy about. So I bought it for him to read and skipped it myself. He really liked it, but I still hadn’t planned on reading it until I read and really liked Black Swan Green.

Cloud Atlas turned out to be much more engrossing than I had originally expected. In structure, it’s a series of stories about different characters in different eras. Mitchell is showing off here, because clearly there’s not anything he can’t do—historical epistolary stories, modern thrillers, ironic farce, futuristic sci-fi. I got into each story, only for it to end midstream. It was very frustrating, until I flipped ahead and realized that he was going to pick up each story again in the second half of the book. The only story I didn’t like was the center story, in a post-apocalyptic future. It was longer than the other stories, since it was all one piece, and it felt too long. Also, it was in dialect, and I hate reading dialect.

The question with books like this that have separate storylines is how they are eventually going to connect. The connections between the stories here seemed a little contrived—a birthmark shaped like a comet, letters from story appearing in the next story, etc. It seems like Mitchell wasn’t really concerned about making connections as much as demonstrating his themes: the perils of progress and the risks of survival of the strongest. In the end, it left me thinking more of 2001: A Space Odyssey than anything else.