Review: Funny In Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas

Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s family and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.

When my book club voted for this book to be on our list for this year I was excited: it was definitely different from our usual fare and it was a promise of a peek into a new cultural experience, which is always something I'm interested in (since I myself am an immigrant other immigrant experiences are something I'm curious about). Besides, the title has the word "Funny" in it, I expected humor and lots of it.
The book started out well enough and at first I could see myself finishing it, but then it took a turn for the worse. It is structured as a series of vignettes covering particular subjects such as doing touristy things in America, kindness of strangers, American food, camp experience, etc. They're not done in any kind of chronological order and one chapter can jump from childhood to adulthood in a paragraph or two. This made it difficult for me to enjoy the experience because I couldn't help but feel unfocused and scattered all over the author's life. The promised humor was there but it was mild and didn't make me chuckle even once.
I got through about a third of the book and realized that I was having an OK experience with it but I didn't really care one way or another what else the author was going to talk about. My main takeaway at that point was that she didn't particularly feel like she belonged in either her family because she grew up very Americanized nor in American society because of her name, appearance and heritage, but she was putting a brave face on it. I also think she possibly was hoping that this book would build a bridge of sorts between the cultures, show the Western world that Iranians are not all terrorists and the Persian world that all Americans don't hate them just because they're Muslim. The fact that this book was written and published after the 9/11 makes this idea plausible for me.
I really wanted to like this book but once I realized it didn't really work for me I set it aside. Life is too short for OK books, especially if they're not required reading (I'm looking at you, Manon Lescaut and Bartleby the Scrivener), even if intentionally or not they make "the other" seem not quite so alien.

Review: C'est la Vie by Suzy Gershman

Suzy had always fantasized about moving to Paris with her husband, but when he dies unexpectedly, she decides to fulfill their dream alone. Here she gives a deliciously conversational chronicle of her first year in Paris and of the dizzying delights and maddening frustrations of learning to be a Parisian.

This is one of the books I found through PaperBack Swap recommendations after reading Entre Nous and giddily requested it hoping for a similarly pleasant experience. It was tough going at first. By page 70 I was thoroughly annoyed with Ms. Gershman because at that point the book read more like a shopping instruction manual with endless mentions of Born to Shop and incessant dropping of names of famous people and brands that began bordering in pretentious. "Is this really who you are, Suzy?" I kept thinking. I get it, this is her life and her social circle, but had it not been for brief glimmers of hope in the form of short entries that actually talked about Paris and the French lifestyle and people unrelated to luxury merchandise and who's who of the Parisian "it" list I would have given up and moved on. I did stick with it though and was rewarded with longer chapters that gave me what I came to Ms. Gershman for - a glimpse of her experience living the French life.
As the book progressed and the chapters got longer and less healfhearted Ms. Gershman's personality began to come through and I began to see something in her that was more than a woman spending away her husband's life insurance money. I could see a practical woman having a hard time but determined to not fall apart, a woman rediscovering and reinventing herself, following her dream and doing it in a foreign country and in a foreign language at that. I liked her spunk and that she had standards and an unfailing sense of humor. I enjoyed her stories about holidays, cooking French deserts for the first time, making new friends and dealing with the internal conflict of nurturing herself and worrying about her son's reaction to her choices. These were real stories and I preferred them to the tales about buying overpriced designer sheets.
This isn't your typical book about starting over in France with the author struggling to make connections outside of the expatriate community or being unreservedly enamored with the French. Ms. Gershman arrived in Paris with a well-established network already in place, she had money, and her lack of fascination with Parisian style is obvious and refreshing. She is unabashedly American and is not trying to blend in. She speaks frankly and in detail about the charm of having an affair and her disenchantment with it, as well as medical issues and the difficulties of navigating the French bureaucratic systems. There is not a gossipy feel like in All You Need to be Impossibly French or the reserved distance like in Entre Nous. It is actually more like Almost French in that the authors see the good and the bad clearly and appreciate France for what it is. I wonder whether these two ladies know each other - they are both freelance journalists and they arrived in Paris at the same time (imagine my surprise when I realized this).
This is a fun book and had the first half been more like the second I would have enjoyed it much more. As it is I would recommend it to those who is moving to Paris or is entertaining the notion, those enjoy shopping, or those who want to see what it's like to live in France. I'm with the last group and some day soon will continue the vicarious adventure.

Review: Curbchek by Zach Forthier

From the testimonials: "Curbchek chronicles the experiences of a police officer as he transitions from a new boot with challenging life experiences to a salty veteran who has been baptized into the dark side of reality by countless hours on the street."
This is a story of law and order uncensored.

We watch crime shows on TV and treat it as just fiction. There's often a clear divide between the bad guys and the good guys and although sometimes the writers of those TV shows show us that things aren't so black and white it's still TV, still fiction. This book isn't fiction. It's the real deal and it shows the ugliness on both sides of the law in no uncertain terms. We're all human, regardless of what we do for a living.
I liked Forthier's no-nonsense style of writing devoid of embellishments or sugarcoating. Things are what they are and there's that. It's not all heavy though, there's humor and a pretty funny story mixed in with the episodes that are anything but. I could tell that despite everything he's been through the author hasn't lost his ability to laugh, even if it's the kind of laughter that's tinged with bitterness.
The book is set up as a series of episodes telling about the cases Forthier worked as a police officer in his hometown after coming back from military duty. It's clear that he came to the force with certain preconceived notions about the job and the people he'd be working with and when reality intervened I think the adjustment was a difficult process that took time and left its own scars.
The stories within each chapter are grouped based on common themes and this gives each episode more impact. The author talks about his experiences and his reasons for doing things a certain way as well as the challenges of the job, and it's clear why he didn't make many friends among other police officers and that the people he wasn't friends with back then aren't going to be won over by this book.
The book is well-written with pacing, narrative, dialogue and voice working together and creating a satisfying reading experience. The only thing I wasn't particularly fond of was the formatting. As I've mentioned before the various episodes are grouped into chapters but there's nothing that separates these episodes. I think it would've been easier to differentiate one story from the other while still preserving the effect by allowing for a divider symbol or extra space between the paragraphs. The 1.5 spacing wasn't my favorite either because it made the book look like a manuscript, which, while easy to read, doesn't make the book look and feel like a finished product.
If you're sensitive to graphic violence or rough language this book is not for you. Work life of a police officer is filled with crime, altercations and profanity, so that's what you get in Curbchek. However, if you want to see what a real cop has to say about his time on the job I believe that you'll enjoy this book. And may be next time you watch a cop show you'll think about what you see a little differently.

Review: Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan

In this New York Times bestseller, Morgan leads readers on the spiritual odyssey of an American woman in the Australian outback. Is it a memoir or a work of fiction? It is up to you to decide.

While I was reading the book I really enjoyed it. There was adventure, there was humor, there was reflection and evaluation of one's past, present and future. It was a fun read and a lot of the lessons the protagonist learned along the way resonated with me, such as appreciating the experiences and not things, knowing that if you've helped one person you did well because you can only help one person at a time anyway, having faith in oneself, appreciating and developing one's talents, not taking more from nature than you need and always making sure you don't take everything. The book was written in a compelling way, it was fun and at the same time thought-provoking, and I breezed right through it even though I acknowledge that this is not one of the more skillfully-done book I've read so far. And then I finished reading, sat back as I usually do, and thought about it longer than usual because something was nagging at me. It took me a little while to figure out that I was having trouble with the fact that some of the events didn't really fit in with the whole, some of the actions of the aborigines went against the characterizations the author gave the tribe earlier in the narrative, and even the timeline was often flexible at best. So I decided to look up what the internet had to say about Marlo Morgan and her book.
A brief search later I learned that when this book was originally published in 1991 it was promoted as nonfiction and in the foreword the author says that the story the reader is about to discover is a true account of what happened to her in Australia. Years later however the book was republished as fiction and there are a few websites that post a wide variety of information intended to prove that the account is in fact fictitious. I have read the articles protesting it, as well as the account of the statement Ms. Morgan's made to the representatives of an Australian Aboriginal association acknowledging that her book is a work of fiction, I've even read about Ms. Morgan's Australian employer saying that her entire stay in Australia was spent working in his pharmacy and there was no time that she was absent from the city. Having read all this I find that more than anything this whole situation makes me sad and disappointed. If what Ms. Morgan writes about really happened then why are people so determined to discredit her and her book? And if her story is fiction then why did she make such an effort to make people believe that it's not? Why apologize to the Aboriginal representatives if there's nothing to apologize for? And if there is something to apologize for then why shrug it off and continue as if nothing happened?
Still I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. What if it was just haters doing their thing. Besides, I wanted to believe that the book is a memoir because the idea of a small society living in peace with themselves and the world around them, and not upsetting the natural balance of their environment is reassuring at a time when we keep hearing about climate change, whole species disappearing, pockets of land that has not been touched by humans becoming smaller and smaller. Now, I'm not a person who'll willingly move out of the city and live without electricity and plumbing to reduce my carbon footprint, but I will recycle and conserve water and power whenever I can, and I do believe that our actions affect the planet in a way that's ultimately detrimental to the length of time the human race will be able to enjoy themselves on Earth. After all, if one uses resources faster than they can be replenished sooner or later they will run out, and we have not yet figured out a way to make natural gas and oil or grow trees faster than it happens in nature.
As much as I wanted to believe in the authenticity of the story I couldn't get past aborigines speaking like urban dwellers, I couldn't reconcile the fact that the author seemed to go between needing an interpreter's help during the simplest of conversations and having complex discussions with members of the tribe without the interpreter present. I did not understand why everybody had names that meant something when translated, such as Secret Keeper and Female Healer, and even Ms. Morgan was given a name fashioned in the same way, but the man who served as interpreter was known simply as Ooota? I was also put off by frequent talk about how the author was losing weight on this walkabout, how pounds were literally melting off of her, and yet we have only relatively general depiction of her life with the tribe. I don't know about you, but I would much rather hear more about the daily life of a people so unlike my own than about how much thinner one American has gotten over the course of several months in the outback. There also seemed to be an undercurrent of "if you reject this account as truth then you're with those who say that people living without technology in the bush are lesser beings and that's just wrong", which grated on my nerves with its one-sidedness.
There is quite a bit of what can be referred to as "new age-y" talk about how all humans are linked to each other, how every experience is a lesson to be learned and if we don't learn it then we're presented with the same lesson again, about living in peace and harmony with ourselves, each other and the world around us, etc. In some things the author completely lost me, in others I agreed with her because ultimately there is tremendous personal value in actively pursuing areas in which one is talented, and being aware of our impact on the world has value for all mankind. These are all good messages, I just wish that Ms. Morgan hasn't cheapened them by trying to pass an account which I believe is fiction as something that really happened to her. All that said, I'm glad that I've read this book, if nothing else it made me think about the world and my place in it while I was reading and about people's goals and intentions when I finished it.

Review: Almost French by Sarah Turnbull

A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor. Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frédéric together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decided to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite for vichyssoise, the feisty Sydney journalist does her best to fit in, although her conversation, her laugh, and even her wardrobe advertise her foreigner status.

My project of experiencing France vicariously through others continues with Ms. Turnbull's adventures as an Australian living in Paris, and I have to say, this account surprised me more than once. My previous experiences were through the frivolous and gossipy All You Need To Be Impossibly French by Helena Frith-Powell and the reserved but admiring Entre Nous by Debra Ollivier. These two ladies presented the French, Parisian women in particular, as confident, chic intellectuals who prefer to spend the afternoon reading a good book in solitude. Ms. Turnbull showed us a different picture. Her Parisians are lonely people riddled with insecurities, fatigued by the structure and rules of the city. Her Paris is a city of contrasts, with perfectly manicured gardens and parks, charming quartiers, beautiful architecture, and streets smelling like urine because while asking to use the bathroom of the people you're visiting may be considered a faux pas apparently urinating outside their building is perfectly acceptable.
Fortunately this is only one side of the story and Ms. Turnbull does a good job of finding and maintaining balance in her narrative. Perhaps it's a journalistic trait, to examine the subject from all sides and report on both the positive and the negative. Or may be it's that life's full of both. In a way Almost French is like a Cinderella story: an Australian girl risks it all by moving to France, has a terrible time of it at first, then finds her stride, learns the language and how to navigate the society, and settles in to a happy life in a city she loves with a man she adores.
The book is full of stories of how all that happened, from the desparation of not being able to find work and eating all the chocolate in the apartment, to the exhilaration of telling off a rude stranger without missing a beat, to the surprise of being overshadowed by her own dog, and they're all written in a fun, engaging way that's personal without becoming too sentimental or giving too much information. There are times when the author sounds a bit whiny, or somewhat pushy, but fortunately those times are fleeting.
One of my favorite things about this book is that it doesn't focus only on the usual subjects of fashion, food and seduction but ventures beyond to the issues of actually living in the city, meeting new people, growing to love the villages and towns beyond Paris, learning to appreciate all the different layers of society in one's quartier and getting things done despite the many rules and regulations that come with living in a coveted zip code. When I finished it I felt like I've actually seen some of the reality beyond what tourists usually see, or what the other two authors either didn't experience or didn't choose to share with their readers. It's a nice to have a differet view even though Ms. Turnbull writes about Paris and France in the 1990s and things may have changed, although I am confident that whatever changes took place they didn't radically alter Paris, France or the French.

Review: MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche

Moving to Chicago to be with her long-term boyfriend left Rachel happy to finally share a zip code with the love of her life but also feeling lonely because all her old friends are in New York and she has no one to have girl time with. Rachel decides to take matters into her own hands and over the course of the year goes on 52 girl-dates in hopes of making new friends, best friends no less. This is a chronicle of her adventures.

The curse of the introvert is that while I enjoy spending time with people I know, getting there (aka making friends) is a challenge. I frequently wonder how some people go from barely acquaintances to friends in no time with zero awkwardness and lately I've been thinking about the general subject of friendship more than usual. So when a friend gushed about this book I jumped at the chance to read it - here's someone asking the same questions and apparently she has answers!
Rachel's memoir is not just a collection of amusing anecdotes about her 52 new girl-dates in search of friends. She's also done some research on the subject of friendship and the narrative is liberally sprinkled with references to books and articles on the subject as well as summaries of her interviews with experts. This did give the book more of a dry air of an almost scientific article than I would have preferred but at least we know without a doubt that the author has thoroughly done her homework! She is also letting us into her life outside the friend-search, giving us a glimpse of how hew new husband was dealing with the whole thing (from what I can tell Rachel better hang on to her Matt, he’s a keeper), her existing friends' and family's support, and her own analysis of herself and her quest throughout the year. It’s interesting to see the transformation of her wish list for the perfect friend from tentative to defined and grounded in the present and her transformation from a young woman seeking companionship to a young woman who has much to offer not only to a potential friend but also to herself.
I really enjoyed reading Rachel’s insights into what it takes to build a friendship, her take on our culture where admitting that you are looking for friends is tantamount to admitting that you are a weirdo looser, and her thoughts about one’s spouse being one’s best friend (or not). I can relate to her nervousness starting out on this adventure and applaud her for not leaving a stone unturned, and for turning into a yes-woman of friend-making in the name of having a social life, which is obviously very important to her.
While I wouldn’t want to repeat Rachel’s experiment (‘exhausting’ doesn’t even begin to cover my impression of the commitment she made over the course of that year) many of the lessons she learned I would like to apply to my own life. After all, when has it hurt to have more friends?

Review: Another Bad-Dog Book by Joni B. Cole

When I first read about this book on another blogger's site I expected something along the lines of lighter Erma Bombeck with a canine in the lead, giving a family's day-to-day a new dimension and teaching them a thing or two about themselves in the process. I got something different - an incredibly sincere and intimate collection of essays about a life that is often unglamorous and riddled with insecurities but is held together by love, family and friends.
Considering the title I thought that Eli, the saucer-eyed pooch, would be more present in the book but besides the first chapter, which is dedicated to the story of how he came to live with the Coles, he only appears one more time and doesn't display any uproarious bad-dog behavior. I think he's more of a quiet presence, a comfort for Joni when she needs it. And with everything she has on her plate I'd say she needs and deserves quite a bit of it.
While reading this book I was repeatedly impressed with Joni's willingness to talk about things that a lot of us save for conversations with people we trust the most, such as the times we realize that our parents have grown old, our desire for our careers to be a bit more glamorous, the challenges or raising children and the days when we wish our friends weren't quite so perfect. This willingness to be vulnerable in public makes Joni more real to me than a lot of other writers, especially because she doesn't try to be "writerly", she just tells her story with wit, attention to her surroundings and skill that makes reading it very much like talking to a friend who has a particular talent with words.
I absolutely loved the last essay and thought it was a wonderful finale. It talks about the reasons the author is uncomfortable with being born in the Year of the Dog according to the Chinese calendar. Incidentally I was also born in the Year of the Dog and have always had mixed feeling regarding what it says about my personality. Joni got to the bottom of hers and helped me understand mine better and gave me some food for thought in the process (the alpha-dog idea is great). She actually gave me plenty of food for thought throughout the book as since as you know I like books that make me think Another Bad-Dog Book gets a 4.

Review: Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

Approaching 30 and stuck in a dead-end job Julie Powell decides to reclaim her life by cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. In the end she finds something she didn't expect - joy and her way in the world.

When trailers for Julie & Julia the movie started to show up on TV I decided I wanted to see it. Meryl Streep is one of the best actresses out there and Amy Adams is just adorable so I figured I'd enjoy the story and them in it. Then a friend of mine told me she bought the book the movie is based on and offered to let me borrow it when she was done with it. Of course I couldn't pass that up and when it was my turn to read about Julie Powell's adventures I dove right in.
Julie's writing style is very conversational and that made it an easy and quick read. It was fun to read about a modern American woman cook things that usually don't even register on the radar of dinner possibilities and it was no less fun to see her navigate the changing landscape of her life when she became a local and later a national celebrity. So I just kept turning the pages well into the night.
Julie herself struck me as a spunky young woman, albeit a bit unhappy about her stagnant life and quite unpardonably whiny and selfish on a number of occasions. Sometimes I though to myself "Really, woman?!" but I loved the humor with which she described both her successes and her failures, and the part where she talked about the comments on her blog resonated with me, as I think it did with most if not all bloggers who read the book - it is extremely exciting to get comments from people you don't already know. I loved how her husband and friends supported her through the highs and lows of this sometimes stressful endeavor and merrily consumed the fruits of her labors. It was also a lot of fun to see how Julia Child inspired Julie to continue with the project and Julie's tribute to Julia at the end of the year made me laugh out loud. It was just too perfect.
I very much enjoyed the book in its entirety but my very favorite part of it was this quote: "Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was. I thought it was all about — I don't know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there's something else, something that these things grow out of. It's joy." This book was pretty much a fun romp and had it not been for this little paragraph I wouldn't have given it another serious thought but after I read it Julie's story gained a little more heft and made me look back at it and life in general from a different angle. It made me want to go and do things "just because" because we all need more joy in our lives, don't we? Can't hurt, that's for sure.

Review: Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster

Jen Lancaster was a successful executive living the privileged life and confident that she had it made until she got fired and in the blink of an eye the unemployment check was all she had to live on. This is the story of a fairy tale being replaced with real life and a woman who goes through dramatic changes before she can get her head above water again.

When a co-worker recommended this book to me she described it as very funny and I expected something along the lines of Erma Bombeck - a light and funny take on serious things from beginning till end. Bitter... wasn't quite like that. Oh it was funny. Uproariously so. Sometimes I laughed till I cried and read passages out to anyone who would listen. I loved Jen's wit and could imagine every person or situation she described in few but always on-target words that cut to the essence of the episode.
But it wasn't always light. It's easy to understand why - being laid off and living on unemployment is scary. Being qualified and unable to find work is infuriating. Trying again and again and failing every time can make one bitter and it is at that time that Jen's incisive humor became mean, merciless and sometimes vulgar and with that it wasn't so funny any more. All that vitriol bothered me in the second half of the book and I was relieved when things started turning around for Jen and I could see the lighter side of her coming out again. It wasn't the same though - I've already seen the dark side.

Review: Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl

Debra Ollivier is a California girl who’s lived in France for 10 years. There she married her husband, had two children and discovered what being a French girl is all about, beyond the stereotype of thin and stylish. And let me tell you, it's not all about wine and cheese and fancy lingerie.

I’ve always had a soft spot for all things French. Some of my favorite authors are Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas Pere, Anne Golon and I dream of being able to read their books without translation. The little black dress is an absolute must have and French onion soup and a piece of baguette make a perfect lunch. The little cafes seem beyond enchanting and La Vie En Rose makes me have goose bumps every time I hear it. And last but not least when I look at pictures of Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tatou and Juliette Binoche I admire their ability to look so effortlessly chic. It is no wonder then that I’ve been picking up books about French women and what gives them that mysterious and self-assured presence and the ability to look so put together no matter how casually they dress. My most recent find is this book and I’m glad to have stumbled upon it. At first glance it’s like All You Need To Be Impossibly French but that’s only at first glance.
This book talks about who the French girl is on the inside, as much as on the outside and it truly is a fun and thought-provoking read. Here Debora Ollivier talks about all the different aspects of a French girl’s life. She discusses the way she dresses, the way she takes care of herself and her family, the way she cooks and entertains, the way she works and spends her leisure time, but that’s not all. She also talks about the way the French girl raises her children, nourishes her mind and focuses on nurturing her true self, not changing her personality according to the latest fad self-help book. According to Mme. Ollivier the true French girl is discreet, selective, private and self-contained and her shape and size have little to do with her level of confidence because she knows who she is and she owns it completely and flaunts it without reservation. I don’t know about you, but taking a few pages out of a French girl’s book seemed like a good idea to me when I finished this volume.
Another aspect of this book that I really enjoyed is that in addition to the author’s insights into the French life we also got little fun tidbits like book and movie recommendations, interesting quotes, recipes and comparisons of life in the States and in France. I laughed out loud reading about Pere Noel and Santa Claus, Halloween in Paris and a block party to which the Parisians brought their fine china. The only thing about these tidbits that I didn’t like is that they appeared in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of a sentence even, and until I figured out to skip them until the chapter’s end and then go back to enjoy them separately I kept feeling interrupted all the time, which as any reader knows is rather annoying.
I would highly recommend this book to any Francophile girl out there for a look at the French girl through the eyes of a girl who’s become French in a way. You can tell she loves her homes on both sides of the Atlantic and that gives the whole thing the air of authenticity the real French girl cherishes so much.