Sorrow Floats. Although I am only halfway through the third installment in this trilogy, I can already say that the second installment, Sorrow Floats, is by far the best. I would not call any of these great literature, but Sandlin’s voice is engaging and although his characters seem awfully familiar, they are familiar in a likeable way.

Skipped Parts, the first novel, is narrated by a teenage boy, and Social Blunders, the third novel, is narrated by that same boy as a disenchanted thirty-something. I don’t really care for him as an adult, so the third book isn’t doing much for me, but Sorrow Floats — the book that first drew me to the series — is much more affecting. The narrator here is Maurey, a young mother who slips into alcoholism after her father’s death, and winds up losing custody of her baby as she slides down towards rock bottom. Sounds like a real upper, doesn’t it?

Oddly, it sort of is. As seen through the eyes of the male narrator in the other two books, Maurey is sort of an impossible fantasy girl, but once she is given her own voice, you find yourself wanting to listen. Although this book was written in the nineties, it feels like a seventies road novel (probably because it is set in 1972 and involves a road trip). The characters, like all of Sandlin’s characters, are a little hokey, a little unbelievable, a little straight out of central casting … but I like them anyway. This trilogy has been a nice diversion, and Sorrow Floats is by far the best of the lot.

Skipped Parts. I finally managed to finish this book, which has been on my to-read list longer than just about anything. When I looked for reviews of Sandlin’s work, I saw lots of comparisons to Tom Robbins and John Irving, neither of which I really understand. I guess he’s raunchy like those two authors used to be raunchy, and he has a wacky cast of characters, but his writing is rougher around the edges than either of those two at their best, and his characters are not as wacky as all that.

I liked the book. There is a Salinger vibe here, and from me that is kind of a criticism, but I liked it anyway. Raunchy coming-of-age novels seem to be a thing of the past, and this book was published fifteen years ago so I wouldn’t count on any kind of comeback for the teenage boy sex novel. I got caught up in the stock characters and the way Sandlin shakes up expectations. The novel is good-humored and funny as hell, so I forgave it a lot.

And there were some things that needed forgiving. In particular, I think Sandlin could do a better job avoiding anachronisms. Over and over, I got pulled out of the moment — 1963 Wyoming, specifically. And in either this or the sequel, Sorrow Floats, which is set in 1972 and which I am reading now, a character refers to a woman as thin “but not anorexic,” and I just don’t think that term entered the popular lexicon until the eighties.

And let us not discuss the appearance of the phrase “present company accepted.”

Those nitpicky issues aside, I liked the book quite a bit, enough to move straight on to the sequel and to order the third book in the trilogy so that I won’t have to wait. I want to know what happens to these characters, and I enjoy the way that Sandlin balances tragedy and humor. And I swear I will deny this if the word gets out, but I kind of miss the days when novelists wrote about fucking.

(Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth blurbed this novel. Drew Barrymore blurbed the sequel. Just some trivia.)

The Magician’s Assistant. The general consensus seems to be that this novel compares unfavorably to Bel Canto, but I disagree. I liked Bel Canto well enough, but I got tired of defending the ending to people who hated it. I thought The Magician’s Assistant was a lovely little novel, oddly hopeful and written with a light touch. I liked it very much, and although it felt sort of slight while I was reading it, I find myself thinking about it now and then, days after I finished it.

And it has a happy ending, Bel Canto haters.

The End. This entry will contain spoilers, although if you are looking for an actual plot summary you’ll have to go somewhere else.

I finished it this morning, after rereading the entire series, including two rereadings each of The Unauthorized Biography, The Beatrice Letters, and The Penultimate Peril. I was spoiled before I started reading it, and I kind of intended to hate it, but I did not. I liked it very much. I usually don’t like heavy-handed political messages, but this is a book for kids, really, and as young adult books go, this one is subtle enough. You’ve got your anti-sectarianism message, your warning against abistinence-only education, and your warning against stupidity in the name of dogma. (If there was ever any doubt that the message of this series is something along the lines of “knowledge is power,” that doubt was pretty much obliterated when the kids were saved by a snake handing them an apple.)

And a lot less is left unresolved than I was led to believe by the spoilers, but you might only get that if you have recently reread everything. By the time I finished The Slippery Slope, I was pretty sure both Baudelaire parents were dead. Quigley points out to Violet that he is probably the survivor of the fire mentioned on page 13 of the Snicket file, and when you figure that Quigley has probably seen parts of the Snicket file since he was working with Jacques, you can probably trust his information. And I don’t think we were intended to think that one of the parents would be alive after that, because the kids really stop looking for them after that the end of that book. They are still looking for answers, and they still have a dim hope that maybe one of their parents survived via the underground tunnel, but a search for their parents is no longer a focus of the story.

I also read that we never find out who J.S. is, but after rereading The Penultimate Peril, I think we were all making that too complicated. It was Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss. No further mystery.

I also figured out on a second reading that the letters to Beatrice were not the same as the letters from Beatrice, although first I thought it was just a time difference — that the letters from her were written earlier, when she was a little girl. But that doesn’t work because she mentions Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. So I guessed that there was a second Beatrice, and I figured she had to be a sibling, but I wasn’t sure if she was younger or older. Obviously I was wrong about who she was, but I was right that there were two of them (not counting the boat).

Obviously he left a lot of questions, but a lot was answered, too, even though some of the spoilers I read said that these questions were left hanging. We do know what happened to the Quagmires — they got swallowed up by the great unknowable, whatever that is. We do know that there is another hotel under the one that burned; that was answered in The Penultimate Peril, so it did not really need to be answered in The End. (And Snicket confirms that it is still there, and someone is still cataloguing, and it hasn’t been found.) We know what was in the sugar bowl (and I think it’s clear that Lemony Snicket has it, that he retrieved it from the pond and had it with him in the taxi when he tried to get the Baudelaires to leave the hotel with him). We know why Count Olaf felt entitled to the Baudelaires’ fortune, since their parents killed his parents and all.

We don’t know some other stuff, or at least I don’t, although I suspect I just didn’t figure it out. Who was the woman who retrieved the sugar bowl from the grotto and took it to Captain Widdershins? I think it was probably Kit Snicket, but I’m not sure. What was the message that Captain Widdershins and Phil left in the refrigerator for the orphans when they abandoned the submarine? I didn’t understand the code, but there was definitely a message. (Six lemon-lime sodas, a bit of soft cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a cake that said “Violet’s Fifteenth Date.”) What was up with the Poes?

And who was Bruce? I think Bruce was Lemony Snicket, but maybe that’s too easy, or too much thinking. Maybe he’s just another volunteer, albeit one who is sort of mysterious and who always seems to turn up at crucial moments.

And, of course, we don’t know what happens next. In the Beatrice letters, the poster and the coded message make it clear that the boat “Beatrice” sinks. The whisk, the hair ribbon, and Klaus’s glasses all float up into a cave somewhere, and the boat is in pieces. We know that little Beatrice somehow makes it to civilization, but are the Baudelaires dead? Did the great unknowable thingie get them? How could Beatrice have heard Sunny’s voice on the radio unless Sunny survived? Are they just separated, or are the older orphans dead?

Maybe that all comes in the next book.

No, this post will not contain spoilers for The End, because I don’t have my copy yet. But I did read The Beatrice Letters, which convinced me that I needed to go back and read the entire series again. I last read the first four books right after they came out, and I listened to the others on audio, which means I probably missed a lot. So after first rereading The Penultimate Peril, I went back to the beginning and started over with The Bad Beginning, and I’m currently in the middle of The Slippery Slope.

I’m not really trying to figure anything out, though, because I think I will be disappointed if I do. The Beatrice Letters reinforced my suspicion that there is not going to be a satisfying resolution. My main reason for feeling that way is the time frame: Beatrice (if there even is such a person; some people think she is a boat, I think she may just be Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego, and who knows, maybe she’s the Baudelaire’s mother, although I think an older sister is far more likely) mentions hearing Sunny on the radio, suggesting that everything between her and Snicket happens in some future time. But Snicket’s hidden message to his sister in The Slippery Slope says that he will meet her at the Hotel Denouement on Beatrice’s birthday … but the hotel has already burned down as of the end of The Penultimate Peril. Maybe he means the hotel under the lake?

In any case, if there is this whole mystery with Lemony Snicket and Beatrice that happens in the future, and if Beatrice is left wondering where her family is, I just don’t see how we are going to get a resolution to both that mystery and the mystery of the Baudelaires all in one book, unless Lemony Snicket turns out to have been a completely unreliable narrator all along. Which I think may be how it works out, but if so, there is not really any point in trying to guess what is going to happen. Either we are going to get another thirteen books, or we are going to be left without any answers. I think that is a given.

My only remaining guess: I still think that the Baudelaire parents are the man with a beard but no hair, and the woman with hair but no beard, although I think the “man” is Mrs. Baudelaire and the “woman” is Mr. Baudelaire, since they are obviously in disguise. And I think they killed Count Olaf’s parents with poison darts at the opera, although that is not so much a guess as something that is pretty much given away in the text.

And as for Beatrice, if she is not just Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego (or if Snicket isn’t HER alter-ego), I think she is probably the Baudelaire’s oldest sister, one who was taken away by V.F.D. as a child (before the schism?). In The Slippery Slope, Violet recalls someone having heard the words “the world is quiet here” sung to her when she was a child; maybe it was her sister who sang the words. Or the people who stole her sister.

But who are Count Olaf’s siblings? He must have some. For that matter, who are Esmé’s siblings? Beatrice’s, if she’s not a Baudelaire? Everyone seems to have siblings. And who is “R,” the Duchess of Winnepeg? I assume we’ll find all of that out in The End, even if we don’t learn much else.

If you have read The End and want to post about it in the comments, please provide plenty of spoiler space for anyone who doesn’t want to have it all ruined.

Voyage of the Narwhal. This book disappointed me, although I did enjoy it and I do recommend it to anyone who liked Ship Fever, her collection of short stories. I am a big fan of that collection, but something about this novel felt a little flat and amateurish to me. Early on I told a friend that it reminded me of those young adult historical novels that I used to order from Scholastic Books when I was a kid, those fictionalized biographies and coming-of-age novels set during the civil war or colonial times. It seemed to me that the novel and its characters lack a certain emotional maturity that is not intentional. By the end I was less reminded of The Witch of Blackbird Pond and its ilk; mostly I was just tired of what felt like cheap emotional payoffs.

Still, it was an engaging read: Arctic exploration, frostbite, and polar bear attacks! It’s not great (or even particularly good) literature, but if you want to read fictionalized accounts of 19th century exploration, you are a hell of a lot better off with Barrett than you are with Beryl Bainbridge.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Continuing the Arthurian kick that prevailed when I stopped updating here. I loved this book the first time I read it, but I have since become too old for it. I did like the way that he dealt with the real history, by making Arthur into the reality and the Wars of the Roses into the myth. That was cool. And it is interesting to see the ways in which this book was influenced by its time; in an odd way it makes me less forgiving of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, because they look like a couple of fascists next to White. But I’m still too old for it.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. Why, God, why, did I reread this? I was too old for this when I was born.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked. Audio. I never finished this when it first came out, but this time I finished it and liked it fine. Actually I liked it a lot, until it was over and I couldn’t exactly remember what I’d liked about it. I was never a huge fan of the Oz books — I read them too late, when I was ten or eleven, and they always seemed sort of babyish to me — but I am a big fan of Oz as an American metaphor. But Wicked didn’t quite work for me on that level. It was fun, how’s that?

Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch. Audio, abandoned. This felt exactly like Wicked except minus Elphaba (uh, I hope it is not a spoiler to tell you that the Wicked Witch of the West dies). And I think maybe Elphaba is what makes Wicked interesting, so this sort of wasn’t. I will probably go back to it; I only quit because I lost my place in the audiobook and then couldn’t find it again. Although that last part is usually not a good sign.

L. Frank Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz. I am still not a huge fan. The annotations were pretty good, although mostly they concerned trivia about the original stage production and the film.

L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Abandoned. Yeah, that’s enough of that. This series was too twee for me when I was ten, and it’s too twee for me now.

Stephen Dobyns, The Church of Dead Girls. I’m not going to say that this book was good, exactly. But of the books on this list, it was possibly the least disappointing. I picked it up in a used book store for four bucks because it looked like a good thriller, and it was in fact a good thriller. I only rolled my eyes and said, “Oh, please,” maybe seven or eight times. I enjoyed it. I would pick up another of his books to read on an airplane, and I don’t really do airplane books.

Martin Amis, Night Train. I read this on accident instead of the book I was supposed to read for my book club, and I don’t really remember much about it except that I thought it was a really great reworking of the noir novel, and that I had no fucking idea what happened to the dead chick. No idea. This book went right over my head.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. Oh, I loved this book so much. This is the best book I’ve read this year. I have nothing to say about it, because I know, I know that the language is ridiculously flowery and the imagery just conks you over the head like it is a caveman and you are its bride, but I loved it, and I want to have twin boys and name them Caleb and Aaron and let them fight it out. And I have finally forgiven Steinbeck for all that annoying shit he wrote, because I love this book.

Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Audio, abandoned. Dear Amy Tan: please do not write any more books. Maybe you could take up pottery.

Larry McMurtry, Telegraph Days. Audio. At some point I wound up in an audio slump; I couldn’t finish a book, couldn’t start a new one, and it occurred to me that Larry McMurtry would be good on audio. And he is. This is read by Annie Potts, who is probably the most adorable person in America. Jeremy and I listened to it on our trip to and from Wyoming, and we both enjoyed it a lot, even though the novel isn’t really about anything and it seems kind of pointless and actually, we didn’t quite finish it and didn’t really care. It is a good book to read as you drive across Utah, and that’s about all I have to say about it.

Larry McMurtry, Boone’s s Lick. Audio. This one is also a little meandering and pointless, and it also has an ending that can be skipped altogether, but it kept me diverted while I washed the dishes.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost. I wound up liking this just fine, and I wanted to know how it turned out, but I was left vaguely disappointed, and I almost dropped it after the first chapter. There is a blurb on the front that calls this possibly the greatest historical mystery of all time, and man, I really hope that isn’t true. I have to hope there are better historical mysteries out there, because I would sort of like to read them. This one was okay except when it was excruciatingly boring or annoyingly earnest, and except when it got all mystical for a while.

Pamela Ribon, Why Moms are Weird. Man, what am I, a hundred? I am too old for everything lately. I had trouble with this because the pop culture references went right over my aged head. But people who enjoy chick lit have been loving this, so if that is your thing, you’ll probably like it too. I didn’t think it was really chick lit, which probably just means I don’t know what chick lit is. To me it seemed a lot like some of Susan Isaac’s stuff, where you have a kind of unlikeable heroine who attracts a whole pack of gorgeous men just because she’s spunky and has big boobs. It doesn’t really feel like a romance novel, because the men, wow, what a pair of assholes. Uh, I wouldn’t read this one if you are single, because it might make you kill yourself. But if you are not single, and if you like chick lit, and if you are younger than I am, and if you don’t feel like reading East of Eden even though Oprah and I both told you that you should, then this is the book for you.

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. This is a fairly recent English translation of a French retelling from 1900; it is not what you want to read if you are a medieval lit geek, but it is by far the most readable version of the story I’ve encountered. Lots of fun. I am usually overwhelmed with not-caring about all tragic lovers, these two included, but I enjoyed this a lot. The author takes all of the major source material and uses it to compile a coherent story that reads like a novel.

As I read it I kept trying to remember what version of the Tristan story I read in college. I know it wasn’t the bit that’s in Mallory, because I read that a couple of summers ago and noted how different it was from what I’d read before. I have a copy of the Beroul on my book shelf, but that doesn’t mean I read it: I also have a copy of the Chretien de Troyes Arthurian romances and I am sure I haven’t read those. Every once in a while I get hit with the King Arthur bug and I buy some stuff and then I realize that, wait, I am not a fourteen-year-old geek boy or a medieval scholar and also I don’t care very much. But I guess I probably read the Beroul. Maybe I will reread it the next time this bug hits me.

(That last paragraph brought to you by being halfway through a rereading of The Once and Future King and realizing that I am way too old for that. I think maybe it is time for me to return to contemporary literary fiction. Soon, please.)

The Lord of the Rings. Once upon a time (I believe it was 2001) my then-boyfriend nearly broke up with me over this book. He didn’t understand how I could have gotten to be 30 years old without ever having read it. His mother had read it to him when he was still too young to understand it, and he’d read it several times since then, but I refused to even try to read it. I was sure it was stupid and that I would hate it.

This was my second time through, and I don’t hate it. I think you could fairly say that I love it, although since I never read it as a kid I am probably too distant to love it the way my husband loves it. And I don’t have very much to say about it, I’m afraid, except that it is still much better than the films, and it really is better if you read the appendices. (I read them first this time through.) Everything critical I have to say about Tolkien I already said after watching the third film, and that earned me so much hate mail that I am not about to go there again.

I have still found no good reason to read The Silmarillion. Even Jeremy isn’t that crazy. I read about sixty pages of it before we went to Mexico, and I could have finished it if I had brought it along on vacation, but that felt like punishment so I said screw it and put it back on the shelf, where I expect it will stay for the next ten years.