Beautiful girls in the city by the bay

I think Lisa See is one of those authors that I like in theory more than I do in actuality.  The plot summaries of her books sound so fascinating!  They take place at such pivotal moments in history, in such vivid settings!  But somehow, the characters never seem to come alive for me, and I'm left vaguely disappointed.

This is pretty much what my experience was reading Shanghai Girls.  Two sisters living it up in Shanghai in the 1930s!  Then they move to the US and struggle to make ends meet through the 1940s.  And deal with the racism of the Communist scare in the 50s.  It all sounds so fascinating.  But it just didn't work for me.

The book did have its good points.  I really enjoyed learning about the high-flying lifestyle of the Chinese middle class between the wars.  I had never heard of the "beautiful girls" who posed for commercial artists in China in the 1930s, whose likenesses ended up anywhere from ads for matchsticks to (later on) propaganda for communism.  I also didn't know much about the conditions for immigration into the US in the 30s, and just how blatantly racist the system was.  It never fails to amaze me just how horribly western governments treated non-whites for so long.  And seeing just how deeply the Red Scare infiltrated people's everyday lives (especially those with a direct link to a Communist country) was eye-opening.  Really important, fascinating stuff.

But gosh, the characters did not do it for me.  The two sisters, Pearl and May, were hard to know and not very likable.  The story is told from Pearl's point of view, but she is not a very dynamic character, and it was a little boring to spend so much time inside her head.  She was scared of everything.  (Granted, much of it with good reason.)  And her sister, May, was so self-absorbed and spoiled that I didn't want to spend much time with her, either.  The other characters were fine, I guess, but didn't stand out as having distinct personalities.  Really, the book seemed to be more about all the suffering and hardship the characters went through rather than their development into strong and individual people.  This is how I felt when reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, too - I just felt like all the characters kept me at arm's length, and as a result, I just never felt emotionally connected to this one.

It's a jungle out there

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is a classic of American literature.  It's one of those books (like Animal Farm) that you feel like you know even before you read it and therefore you don't have to read it.

The Jungle takes place in Chicago, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to cross it off my list of classics to read.  It was serendipity that I read it so soon after My Year of Meats because I think My Year of Meats references The Jungle in many ways.  Both books are ostensibly about the meat industry, but they use the industry to bring much-needed attention to societal problems such as the plight of the poor or the dangers of animal hormones.

The Jungle was not a particularly entertaining read.  It was, like My Year of Meats, more of a diatribe or lecture nestled into a novel.  The Jungle was even more depressing, though, because there was NO REAL HAPPINESS in it ANYWHERE.

It centers on an immigrant man who becomes a worker in the Chicago stockyards (saying things like "I will work harder," a quote George Orwell used in Animal Farm to promote socialism) and then loses everything after he gets injured and then gets in a fight.  But luckily, there are communists!  And they save him.

It is a LONG HAUL before we get to the happy communist comrades, though.  Lots of gross meat-packing horrors, lots of time spent in jail, lots of struggling on the streets of Chicago, lots of despair and death.  It is possible that the writing was really great, but if so, it was lost on me through the grind of depressing events.  It was never-ending.

That said, I am glad that I read The Jungle.  Not only because it made me feel better about my own life, but because it also was such an important book in American history.  An important law about meat purity was passed after President Roosevelt read the book (hopefully the industry still follows that law, though there are probably many more that are worthy of being passed now).  So reading The Jungle made me realize that books really can have a huge impact on the world and create positive momentum (even when they are so depressing).  So - yay!

Calliope --> Callie --> Cal, a gender journey

I finally read Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex!  I've had this book since 2007.  I'm quite proud of myself :-)  I didn't read the physical copy, though, but read the audiobook.  And the audiobook is fantastic!  I think that this is really an excellent method for me to get books that have been on my TBR list read more quickly, especially those that have been on it for years and years.  It's hard to find most of the old, more obscure ones on audiobook, but for books like Middlesex, which is quite popular, you're almost guaranteed to get a great narrator.

And that's exactly what happened here!  I really enjoyed this book.  It's just the sort of multi-generational saga that can be so grand and epic when done well.  I am so glad that I already own a copy of it so that I can hug it to my chest and sigh in satisfaction.

If there is an updated list of books with amazing opening lines, I would put Middlesex up there:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Yul Brynner Inspires Illegal Border Crossings

One of my unofficial reading goals for the year is for at least 50% of the books I read to be written by people of color.  A difficulty I have with this goal is that my personal collection of books is sadly not very diverse.  While I work on purchasing more books by minorities, I have been supplementing with selections from the Chicago Public Library's fantastic collection of audiobooks.

The most recent book I've gotten from that collection is Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Alberto Urrea.  Urrea is an author of Mexican and American heritage who writes both fiction and non-fiction about immigration.  Into the Beautiful North is about a group of young Mexican women (and one man) who live in the town of Tres Camarones.  Over the past several years, the economy has dried up and all of the men have left town to try their luck in America.  As a result, there are no men left to defend the city from the mafiosos and there aren't any children around, either.

After watching the movie The Magnificent Seven at the local theater, a small group of friends gets the inspiration to go north to America, find seven Mexican men, and bring them back to Tres Camarones to keep the town safe from the mafiosos.  So they set off into the beautiful north on a grand adventure to save their town.