It probably was a little weird that read Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, right after finishing Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, since they’re both pretty dark books and what I wanted most after The Round House was a palate cleanser.But in some respects, Sharp Objects fits that bill since it’s an addictive, fast-paced story, but it’s equally as dark and even more twisted. I any case, I enjoyed the heck out of both these books!

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe’s life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

I think the best thing I can say about The Round House is that when I got to the last page I immediately wanted to start it over again to see what I missed the first time around. The book is told from some future point where Joe is looking back on the summer his mother was raped, and this Future Joe makes lots of allusions or hints about what is to come that are cryptic and wonderful and beg to be revisited with the full weight of the story.

More broadly, I think what elevates The Round House above other literary fiction or literary thrillers is the connection to the social and legal issues at stake on a reservation. In particular, the legal loopholes that can exist when it’s not clear where a crime happened (reservation or not) seem so antiquated and insane, it’s impossible not to feel angry for Geraldine and Joe. The Round House was a deeply moving, dark, wonderful read.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

In retrospect, it’s totally insane that I followed up The Round House with this book a couple days later, which is both dark and twisted. But it was a Friday night, I was exhausted, and I wanted a book that was engaging and short enough that I could just read it in one sitting. Sharp Objects fit that bill completely. I don’t think this one is as good as Gone Girl — it leans a little heavy on the crime and more lightly on the nuanced psychological drama — but you can see some of the themes about female power and manipulation in this one too. I’m weirdly looking forward to Dark Places to complete the Gillian Flynn trifecta.

Disclosure: I purchased my copy of Sharp Objects and checked out The Round House from my local library. 

Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Flickr

Time // 9:40 a.m.

Place // At my very messy desk. I need a system for corralling paper.

Eating // Strawberries, powdered sugar donuts, and peach Greek yogurt

Drinking // Blood Orange Cinnamon tea

Reading // I had a crazy week at work, so I didn’t have as much time to read as I would have liked. I did finish Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins and the first section of Telegraph Avenue for #readchabon. Yesterday I also read a few chapters of A Chance to Win by Jonathan Schuppe, a book about a little league baseball team in Newark, N.J.

Watching // Nate (the boyfriend) and I watched a couple of movies this week, Argo and Moonrise Kingdom. And yesterday I started watching Fringe, which is FINALLY on Netflix Instant. I’ve had that on my “To Watch” list for a long time so that was exciting.

Listening //At the moment, I’ve got music from the ABC drama Nashville playing the in background (that show is a guilty pleasure — I have a big crush on Connie Britton). I’ve also been listening to the audio book of Mockingjay this week.

Blogging // It was a quiet-ish week on the blog this week with just two reviews, one for The New Republic by Lionel Shriver (didn’t love) and The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild (thought provoking).

Promoting // There have been a bunch of good posts recently about the question of what readers “owe” authors or entities in the reading world. For different takes on this I suggest posts by The Picky Girl (which I may have already recommended… I can’t remember) and Brenna and Andrew over a Book Riot.

Writing // I also have a couple of my own Book Riot posts I’d like to point out: Roger Ebert’s Best Reviews of Movies Based on Books and Paperback Releases: Love ‘Em or Leave ‘Em. I’m proud of how both of those posts turned out.

Researching // Some girlfriends and I are planning a girls weekend for this fall and, because they are kind and indulge me, we’re planning a “book club” for the weekend. I’m in charge of finding a book for us to read together which is an interesting challenge. I want it to be something discussable, but not too deep or dark because we’re having a nice weekend together. I’m open for suggestions if anyone has them.

Hating // The weather, still. We got almost five inches of snow on Thursday and it hasn’t warmed up since. We were supposed to get several inches of ice/sleet last night, but that doesn’t appear to have arrived yet. I took that picture of Hannah on Thursday afternoon — she appeared defeated by the weather too. I’m this close to buying a cheap plane ticket to somewhere warm for a long weekend. Vacation suggestions?

Avoiding // I have to clean Hannah’s litter box today… a chore I hate. I also have to do laundry, but I hate that one a little less.

Anticipating // Watching Possession tonight with the rest of the #readbyatt folks. We’re starting at 7 p.m. CST if you want to join us!

Happy Sunday! What are you reading today?

Title: The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Other to Live Our Lives for Us
Author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: Picador (Paperback)
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Publisher’s Summary: We’ve long imagined the family as being apart from the marketplace, the one realm where the personal and the private hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, the market has quietly invaded our homes in a huge variety of ways — as we turn to dating services, wedding planners, eldercare workers, eldercare managers, life coaches, and sometimes even surrogate mothers across the world to bear our biological children. How, Hochschild asks, do we keep personal life feeling personal? Even if we never buy anything, why are we beginning to think of personal life as business people look at profit and loss, return on investment, and the bottom line? Can’t we find a better balance?

Review: Since 2004, the year I moved out of my parents house and into the dorms at my university, I’ve moved 11 different times. And every single one of those times, my mom, my dad, my brother and my sister and my friends have been there to help me. But that’s a luxury (or perhaps tradition) that people who move far away from their social networks often don’t have. Instead, a huge industry of professionals has developed specifically to fill a gap created by diffused communities.

While The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild never specifically mentions movers (I think they’re too functional for her purposes), it was the best example I could think of from my own life that sort of illustrates the conundrum of this book: what happens when we allow market-driven services into our personal lives? What are the emotional and social repercussions of outsourcing tasks that we used to rely on our network of family and friends to help complete?

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Title: The New Republic
Author: Lionel Shriver
Genre: Fiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: HarperCollins
Acquired: From the publisher as part of a TLC Book Tour
Rating:

Publisher’s Summary: Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. When he leaves his lucrative law career for a foreign correspondent post in a Portuguese backwater with a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes Barrington Saddler, the disappeared reporter he’s replacing, as the larger-than-life character he longs to emulate. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba — “The Daring Soldiers of Barba” — have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal and backward that you couldn’t give the rathole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do incidents claimed by the “SOB” suddenly dry up?

Review: When I read the premise of The New Republic — a wannabe journalist heads to a backwater town to cover a fledgling terrorist movement — I was intrigued by a lot of things. I’ve enjoyed Lionel Shriver’s writing in the past (particularly The Post-Birthday World), and I love stories about foreign journalists (like Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists). This book seemed like it might meld some of those things.

The plot also reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In Heart of Darkness, broadly, a riverboat captain named Marlow tells the story of a trip into the jungle seeking the elusive Mr. Kurtz, an agent in the Congo who may have “gone native” during his time there. The idea of journalist Edgar Kellogg heading into a wild place to seek a missing person echoed that, and I’ll admit I read a good chunk of this book wondering if we might find out that beloved Barrington Saddler also “went native” and became part of the terrorist organization he was trying to cover.

Unfortunately, all of the things I was hoping this book might be never really coalesced for me. The biggest difficulty I had with this book was Edgar himself. He’s an unpleasant fellow that the book doesn’t really give much motivation to be unpleasant other than his drive to be popular. But at the same time, he’s entirely bland — the book repeatedly casts him as the second fiddle, the backup player, the vice president. You can almost feel sorry for him in some moments.

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