A Valentine's Day Letter to Gianna

Dear Gianna,

Gianna, where has our love gone?

It's that time of year again when your girlfriend texts me looking for gift ideas for you on that day for lovers and then refuses to accept "Zorro, gift wrapped" as a legitimate suggestion. It's also a time to reflect on my state of loneliness in this cruel world. You used to at least fake-attempt to find me a companion to suffer through the world's miseries together. You don't seem to care at all anymore. And I'm so lonely! I should just give away the cat and end this struggle against my existential angst. Gianna, I know that your girlfriend says that you wouldn't want a cat for Valentine's Day, but he's a special cat.

Since you want me to suffer alone, I decided that I should embrace my solitude with the appropriate Friday night, Valentine's Day reading. I'd watch a Girls marathon on TV, but those ladies have friends. Sigh. I'm a ship adrift. Gianna, I thought you were going to set up an OKCupid profile for me. Maybe this will help inspire you.

Five books to read on Valentine's Day if you're as pathetic as Liz:

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Here's the story of a kid who graduates college, gives away all of his possessions, and wanders around the country in search of authenticity. He ends up in a broken down bus in Denali National Park. Spoiler: he dies. Happy Valentine's Day!

I loved Hotel World by Ali Smith. One reason I loved it is because the main character falls to her death in the dumb waiter shaft at the hotel where she works. Yep, she's dead for the whole book. It's similar to The Lovely Bones, but better written.

Sometimes it's good to keep things in perspective. At least this isn't a post-apocalyptic world in which it's just you and your kid wandering down a road and trying to avoid the gangs of cannibals roaming for meat (you). Thanks Cormac McCarthy. You always know how to cheer me up. For one thing, at least I don't have a kid. The Road is a feel good read if ever there was one.

Gianna, why can't you find me a soul mate like the couple in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go? Their love is timeless, beautiful, and even though they are clones being harvested for their organs in a near future dystopia (spoiler!), they never stop loving each other.

You know what book I love? Revolutionary Road. This is the story of a perfect match. There are so many broken dreams and mounting disappointments, much like our relationship, dear Gianna, that I don't know where to start. Remember when we were happy, before you forced me to settle for motherhood and thought that one more kid, the one I didn't want, would make us happy? I am the Kate to your Leonardo, or something.

Happy Valentine's Day, dear friend.

Love,

liz

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 8

If you're one of the tens of people who like our little blog here, be sure to check out our newly created Facebook page (Liz and Gianna's Adventures in Book Land).  We're posting book-related morsels as we find them.  We've also created a Twitter account for the added challenge of reducing substantive commentary down to a pithy 140 characters.  Our Twitter handle is @AdvInBookLand.  Gianna's CB handle is Undergarment Varmint LaMorte.  I'm not sure why.  She can explain it to you.

On to the book challenge.

Day 8: Favorite Science Fiction Book

That's right boys and girls, we're diving head first into genre fiction.  One of my bookseller pals at BookPeople once convinced me to read this space opera book that included a runaway train and the hero having, uh, relations with a "woman" who was covered in blue fur.  I don't remember the title.  I do remember wondering if it's bestiality if the "woman" is covered in blue fur.

Gianna:

I haven’t read a lot of science fiction, and outside of Penthouse Letters VII, I haven’t read any fantasy. However, I have read what is widely considered the finest mass-market novel about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence published in 1995 (how is that for narrowing the field?). That’s right bibliophiles…Carl Sagan’s Contact. Try not to think about the movie. I mean, personally I’ve seen it, like, five times but it's Jodie Foster trying to sell a sexual attraction to Matthew McConaughey. I mean, if you can NOT watch that…well...I don’t know...I guess you and I really don’t have that much to talk about. [I've seen Contact so many times that I scream "Okay to go!" every time I'm locked inside a pod about to be dropped into the center of a gyroscope just on principle.  Don't you?] Anyway, I loved the novel Contact (which is only a novel, by the way, because Sagan couldn’t get the film off the ground).  It was really refreshing to read such a smart book about aliens coming to take me away. [Aliens aren't the only things poking at Gianna.] This book, by the way…real math-y, which I normally try to avoid. If I look on the back of a book and it mentions binary numbers or pi (not the good kind) or quite frankly addition…I am going to look the other way.

It's called 'chemistry' for
a reason. It looks like
she's desperate to flee.

I read this book over 15 years ago so I am tempted to give it another go. I mean you guys know that we aren’t alone right? Also if anyone wants to watch Contact….call me.

Liz:

Okay, I admit that I suggested this topic in the wider scope of suggesting favorite mysteries and chick lit and other categories of fiction, but I didn't really consider the fact that I really don't read science fiction books.  I have never read: Philip K Dick, Ursula K LeGuin, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, George Orwell, Aldus Huxley, or Arthur C. Clarke.  I've never read Neal Stephenson, China Mieville, Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, or Stanislaw Lem.  I could write about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but considering the recent political climate, it's less fictional and more "harbinger of Michele Bachmann to come."  Atwood also has a couple of books about apocalyptic environmental change, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, but since it hasn't rained in Texas in about 1,000 years, again Atwood proves too prescient for comfort. 

So let's go with another favorite near-future possibility: organ harvesting!  Nothing warms my heart like the thought of removing my stone cold little rock and replacing it with an actual warm heart.  Thankfully, Man Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro gets me.  He wrote a terrific book about special children growing up at a boarding school for exceptional children.  It's a love story--no, really!--and a philosophical exploration of humanity broken down into usable parts.  I think my twin has already claimed dibs on my cirrhosis-free liver, actually.  Oh, wait, the title?  It's Never Let Me Go.  You should read it.  And your book group should read it.  And we should all thank our lucky stars that we're not covered in blue fur.

The End of the World As I Know It

I confess that I have a fondness for apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. The creepier the end-world scenario, the better--and what makes them creepy? The creepiest novels are the ones that seem eerily possible. Twenty years ago, Margaret Atwood predicted that a hyper-fundamentalist theocracy would begin to brainwash the country, subjugating women. And today, driving to Mississippi, I eavesdropped on a conversation at a convenience store that involved a woman telling a man that the reason a mutual acquaintance was still single was "'Cause she's lazy and she won't cook. How's she ever going to get a man if she can't cook?" I am pretty sure that religious cults insist that women know how to cook...writes the single woman who absolutely refuses to spend her free time in the kitchen. Pot? Kettle.

Anyway, there's a lot to fear in the near future, and here are a few of my favorite alternative, probably bleak, novels.

NEVER LET ME GO--Kazuo Ishiguro's terrific novel about exceptional teens raised in a "special" school will soon debut nationwide as the new film starrng Kiera Knightley. Ishiguro is a Booker Prize-winning writer, the story rivals all the great love sagas of literature, and then there's the creepy truth about these kids' lives and their special value to society. I can't wait for the movie.


CLOUD ATLAS--If you asked me what my favorite book of the decade was, it would be this experimental novel by the brilliant David Mitchell. CLOUD ATLAS ingeniously blends together six separate stories, from a Patrick O'Brien-esque naval tale to a "China Symdrome" nuclear threat to a dystopian future akin to Kevin Costner's "Waterworld," all centering on the theme of free will and independence. This book reaffirmed my desire to stay in the book business when I was considering graduate school. Books are just more fun.

THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD--No one manages to blend literary prestige with speculative fiction like Margaret Atwood, and THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD is her most recent stroll into the near future. The events of YEAR OF THE FLOOD are the same as those in ORYX & CRAKE, both book looking at what will happen if we continue to destroy the environment and tamper with potentially dangerous genetic engineering of the food supply. Killer viruses, a hippie gardening cult, and strippers make THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD highly entertaining as well as scary.

THE UNIT--Swedish authors are hot right now, with the Stieg Larsson trilogy dominating all of the top spots on the NYT Bestseller List, but don't think that Stieg is the only Swedish author out there. THE UNIT, by Ninni Holmqvist, is set in the near future and centers around Dorrit, a woman-of-a-certain-age who, upon turning 50, moves into a retirement community of sorts with other aging, childless singles. It's like a seniors mixer/party in a dorm facility, with classes and dances...and organ harvesting. THE UNIT questions a person's worth beyond one's ability to reproduce. Maybe if Dorrit had learned to cook and moved to Mississippi she'd have found a man....

THE ROAD--Cormac McCarthy's novel of a father and son trying to survive after global catastrophe, with cannibals roaming around and horrors around every corner, received a big push when Oprah picked it for her book group a few years ago. It's a bleak book to be sure, but also a moving portrait of love in the face of adversity.

THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING--How could you not be curious about a book written by a guy who used to be a psychiatric nurse and then moved to Australia? These linked stories assume that the global shutdown foretold with Y2K does transpire and the world is thrown into chaos and famine. It could have happened.

THE RAPTURE--This creepy thriller centers around the daughter of religious fundamentalists who predicts the future...a future that involves 1,000 foot tidal waves destroying the earth. The cause of the waves? An offshore oil rig disturbs the dangerously volatile frozen methane at the bottom of the ocean, creating a massive explosion. You know, sort of like the recent gulf oil spill.

All of these books open lots of room for discussion, making them ideal for book groups.