"Amazing Amy stands for a newer creation: lovely girls, expensively educated to seize success for themselves (Amy has diplomas from Harvard and Yale), and yet still groomed for the dream of a beautiful dress and a white cake. As Nick puts it in the novel, 'Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.'

"If no longer vital to a woman’s status as a human being, marriage is still understood as her crowning success, the event without which her life won’t be truly complete. When Amazing Amy grows up, she can’t not get married. The world is still no place for single women. They are regularly bombarded -- and I say this, let’s face it, from experience -- by both well- and ill-intentioned comments about their inability to find that special man."

--from Elif Batuman's terrific though spoilery essay on GONE GIRL, "Marriage Is An Abduction," for the New Yorker.

Books I didn't finish in 2014 and am dragging with me into 2015

Maybe they're emblematic! But probably not.

Ruth Ozeki, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING -- I really enjoyed this book up until the funeral (I hope that's vague enough to avoid all spoilers), a scene I found so upsetting that it was difficult for me to focus on everything that happened after. I'll probably finish it eventually, I just feel averse.
Jaimy Gordon, LORD OF MISRULE - someone left this National Book Award winner on the free shelf at work, making it easier for me to give it 10 pages before (as previously) I had rejected it as "not for me." I was fairly captivated -- but I was traveling somewhere, and it was a hardcover, so I set it down. As one does.
Sara Paretsky, BLACKLIST (no relation to the James Spader hamfest of the same name) -- started when I was at home over Christmas because my mom is a fan. Honestly, I should probably bump this one up so I don't forget all the clues in the mystery.
Gillian Flynn, DARK PLACES -- my library loan unexpectedly came up on Dec. 30 for this earlier novel by the author of GONE GIRL. So far it's even darker and bleaker -- fun! This is also an upcoming movie

"Gone Girl": See it or skip it?

I wanted to poll the audience here. The hotly anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL opens today in theatres. Anecdotally I've heard everything from "Looks terrible" to "I'm already lining up to see it," but one thing I haven't heard is the classic "I don't want to see it because I don't want it to affect how much I like the book."

Are you planning to see "Gone Girl"? Where are your expectations for it?

One-Star Revue: Gillian Flynn, GONE GIRL

In 2012 Flynn's third novel broke through the potential genre bounding of its missing-white-female plot to become the year's second true book blockbuster, sharing space with Cheryl Strayed's memoir WILD. It may be of interest to imagine "Amazing" Amy, the disappeared spouse who kicks GONE GIRL into high gear when she vanishes, trailing along behind Strayed, but the authors of these one-star reviews from Amazon would just as soon leave her up there without a pack. Not surprisingly, most of them focus on the book's very divisive ending, which I personally liked. But you'll find no spoilers here:

• "It felt like halfway through the author just got bored and decided to torture us."
• "It wasn't entertaining, just depressing as all get out. Shame on the author for such a let down."
• "I don't mind being "played" as a reader if the payoff is 'Of course!' the way it often is in these twisty little passages of novels, but this just made me feel I was playing in a mudbox and I wanted to wipe it off my hands."
• "A book of pure hate, not the least of which is a long series of characters (not all of them men) who are both obvious and subtle misogynists."
• "Mystery readers like to have all information and try to figure out the plot. Did not happen in this book."
• "As obviously brilliant and insightful as the author is about the mind of men and women, SURELY she could have come up with a twist in the end to not leave you feeling like you need a shower to wash it off of you. And I don't mean that in a good way."
• "I read fiction in order to have a vicarious experience that I enjoy. That's why I don't read stuff with excessive gore, explicit endless hump-hump-hump sex, or 'inside the mind of a serial killer' because I do not WANT to be in there. I want to be in a fun rollercoaster ride that delivers what it promises. This did not."
• "I'm sorry it didn't turn out better for all of our sakes."

July Unbookening

"Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life." - James Wood

Got 3 books to review
Had 1 returned to me (who wants to borrow my copy of GONE GIRL next?)
Checked 8 out from the library
12 in

Lent 3
Returned 5 to the library
Donated 19 - 2 to the Saint Marks Little Free Library, the rest to Housing Works
27 out

Did I say four unread Henry James novels? I meant five. Yeah... five. I guess I know what I'll be doing in a few months. What's your favorite James? I've only read THE TURN OF THE SCREW so I have my work cut out for me.