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Mar. 24th, 2018 08:22 pmThe most fun is when you're reading a book for book group and you're super angry about a bunch of things and then you get to book group and everyone is mad about the EXACT SAME THINGS.
This month's book group book was Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, in which a modern author attempts to write Jane Austen but, alas, succeeds at neither affectionate satire nor romance. Which is not to say she succeeds at nothing! This book is largely full of very believable people, and parts of it work very well; I just hated every single male character in it.
(Well, that's not true. There was a genial Chasidic rabbi whom I quite liked, two very incidental gay booksellers who occasionally flirted with each other at parties, and a stressed-out HR manager with a bad back who I just wanted to get a massage chair and leave the book forever. These men were all fine. I exempt them from the blanket condemnation.)
The book is a Period Piece about two sisters in The Year 1999; Emily, the elder sister has founded an internet startup right on the cresting wave of the dot-com boom, and Jess, the younger sister, is an idealistic Berkeley philosophy student who works part-time at a used bookstore and spends the rest of her time attempting to save the trees.
Half the book takes place in Berkeley, where Jess dates an intense tree-saving activist and moves into his revolutionary commune while her middle-aged millionaire antiquarian bookstore boss George pines after her creepily. Then Jess and George acquire a historical cookbook collection for the bookstore and become mutually obsessed with it. The cookbook collection is lovely and interesting! WOULD THAT GEORGE WERE SO. ( Spoilers! )
The other half takes place in Cambridge, where Emily's boyfriend Ruthless Entrepreneur Jonathan also runs a less successful startup and may or may not be planning to steal Emily's development ideas. Jonathan is awful. We are supposed to hate Jonathan. ( Spoilers! ) We are not supposed to hate Jonathan's friend Orion, a programmer who's finding himself left behind by the startup's rapid capitalization and also stagnating in his relationship with his girlfriend Molly, but WE DID HATE HIM. WE HATED HIM SO MUCH.
We also hated Sorel, the object of Orion's straying affections and the only female programmer at the startup, who is beautiful and sylphlike and British and has a band and occasionally spends her weekends as a living statue in Harvard Square. Comments about Sorel from book group: "Why did you put Amanda Palmer in this book? Having a real Amanda Palmer is already bad enough!" "At first I thought Sorel was completely unbelievable, but then I realized, I do know people like that, it's just that in Cambridge they're all also two out of the following three -- queer, poly, or trans -- and Sorel is none of those things! She would be way more likeable AND more realistic if she were!"
....so that's all the stuff I hated but THERE WAS LEGITIMATELY some stuff I liked ( much of which is spoilery but goes under a cut )
This month's book group book was Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, in which a modern author attempts to write Jane Austen but, alas, succeeds at neither affectionate satire nor romance. Which is not to say she succeeds at nothing! This book is largely full of very believable people, and parts of it work very well; I just hated every single male character in it.
(Well, that's not true. There was a genial Chasidic rabbi whom I quite liked, two very incidental gay booksellers who occasionally flirted with each other at parties, and a stressed-out HR manager with a bad back who I just wanted to get a massage chair and leave the book forever. These men were all fine. I exempt them from the blanket condemnation.)
The book is a Period Piece about two sisters in The Year 1999; Emily, the elder sister has founded an internet startup right on the cresting wave of the dot-com boom, and Jess, the younger sister, is an idealistic Berkeley philosophy student who works part-time at a used bookstore and spends the rest of her time attempting to save the trees.
Half the book takes place in Berkeley, where Jess dates an intense tree-saving activist and moves into his revolutionary commune while her middle-aged millionaire antiquarian bookstore boss George pines after her creepily. Then Jess and George acquire a historical cookbook collection for the bookstore and become mutually obsessed with it. The cookbook collection is lovely and interesting! WOULD THAT GEORGE WERE SO. ( Spoilers! )
The other half takes place in Cambridge, where Emily's boyfriend Ruthless Entrepreneur Jonathan also runs a less successful startup and may or may not be planning to steal Emily's development ideas. Jonathan is awful. We are supposed to hate Jonathan. ( Spoilers! ) We are not supposed to hate Jonathan's friend Orion, a programmer who's finding himself left behind by the startup's rapid capitalization and also stagnating in his relationship with his girlfriend Molly, but WE DID HATE HIM. WE HATED HIM SO MUCH.
We also hated Sorel, the object of Orion's straying affections and the only female programmer at the startup, who is beautiful and sylphlike and British and has a band and occasionally spends her weekends as a living statue in Harvard Square. Comments about Sorel from book group: "Why did you put Amanda Palmer in this book? Having a real Amanda Palmer is already bad enough!" "At first I thought Sorel was completely unbelievable, but then I realized, I do know people like that, it's just that in Cambridge they're all also two out of the following three -- queer, poly, or trans -- and Sorel is none of those things! She would be way more likeable AND more realistic if she were!"
....so that's all the stuff I hated but THERE WAS LEGITIMATELY some stuff I liked ( much of which is spoilery but goes under a cut )
