Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I just started this last night and already I don’t want to do anything else except listen to it.

Birds Without Wings. I will start with the short version: Birds Without Wings is about two hundred pages too long and it is not in the same league as [Captain] Corelli’s Mandolin. Had I been reading it rather than listening to it, I would have skimmed entire sections, and I would have probably thrown it across the room by the time I got to the end. (It was not quite bad enough to make me throw my iPod.)

I should say at the outset that while I loved Corelli’s Mandolin, I don’t quite trust de Bernieres. He’s a British guy who writes these charming books about charming villagers in charming places doing charmingly magical or at least wise and knowing things while terrible events happen around them. He always throws in a beautiful girl and a wise old village guy and, apparently, a funny Italian captain in the occupying army, and while atrocities happen, the characters in the book are always too kind-hearted and loving (and did I mention charming?) to participate.

It hadn’t occurred to me when I read it, but in retrospect I think one of the reasons that Corelli’s Mandolin was not unbearable in the way that Birds Without Wings was sort of unbearable is that the character of Mandras complicates things a bit when he stops being charming. (I am leaving that vague to avoid spoiling the story, because it really is a hell of a read and if you didn’t read it back when it was the big buzz book you should get right on that now.) Birds has none of that complexity, although it otherwise has a lot in common with Corelli; Mandras, in fact, appears as a little boy as his mother and father are driven with other Christians out of Anatolia. Antonio Corelli is mentioned once, and Mandras’s mother has a couple of chapters of her own. The setting is different in that Birds takes place before, during, and after World War I in a village in what is now modern Turkey, and Corelli took place during and after World War II on the Greek island of Cephalonia.

Birds is not a complete disaster. I enjoyed the stories about Rustem Bey, a Muslim landowner who seems to own the entire village, and his wife and mistress. I think even those stories were maybe a little bit patronizing, but I liked them okay. I liked Iskander the potter and his son, Karatavuk, and the son’s friend, and Ibrahim the goat herd, and the various wives and the crazy Greek teacher and basically every single character except for stupid Philothei, who just sits around being beautiful until it is time for her to be tragic. And that is kind of the problem, in the end: every single character in the village is likeable and charming and wise and tolerant, even though all the atrocities recounted in the novel are being committed by somebody. When the village boys go off to war they remain mostly unscathed, and even the exception to that rule is one village boy who participates in the scourge of Smyrna but can’t bring himself to rape anybody. The Christians and Muslims all like each other and intermarry, which I can completely buy, except that there is never even a glimmer of interfaith dislike or suspicion, and I cannot buy that we go from that state to mass deportation without a single bad feeling on either side.

The novel is also overly long and occasionally deeply tedious. De Bernieres has included long historical interludes focusing on Kemal Atatürk, and those are helpful if you are ignorant of the history but they go on much too long and take you away from the very charming village characters who are the only reason to stick with this monster of a book. I started feeling a little dumb so I went and read a couple of web pages about the end of the Ottoman Empire, and those apparently told me all I needed to know, because after that the historical sections bored the crap out of me.

I did not hate the book and I would recommend it if you love sweeping historical novels with quirky and charming village characters and you don’t demand moral complexity in your literary characters. De Bernieres does do a very nice job of creating a completely absorbing fictional world, so if you are less cranky than I am you might enjoy this novel a lot. Me, I could not wait for the damn thing to end.

Yesterday afternoon I turned in my final papers for the semester — a day early in one case, and three days early in the other. I never hand anything in early so this has me kind of stunned and also very relieved.

The three papers (two short stories, one take-home final essay) totalled just over 40 double-spaced pages. Between Thursday and Friday at work, I wrote a little over 80 double-spaced pages. That is 120 pages in four days, and they were hard pages.

Don’t anyone ever let me say I don’t have time to write a novel, okay? I may not have the brains or the ideas to write a novel, but I don’t get to complain about time. Not if I can write 120 pages in four days.

This de Bernieres book is never going to end. Just slaughter the Christians already so I can listen to something else.

As I Lay Dying. Another fast reread for school. I reread this because I wrote my seminar paper on this novel and Last Orders; the latter borrows plot and structure and theme pretty heavily from Faulkner. As I Lay Dying is a book that I like better every time I read it, because the story is deceptively simple and you can miss a lot.

This will be on my exam list and the book club is discussing it in March, so I will probably have more to say about it then.

Atonement. I forgot to list this one because it was a very fast reread for school. When I read it last year, I had this to say:

I did not hate it. I enjoyed some parts of it a lot, and some parts of it just went on and on forever. I disagree with Ian [scroll down to his Atonement review] about the metafictional elements; I think they were the only reason for this book to exist. (And I am very glad that people aren’t still just rewriting the works of Jane Austen.) That said, I don’t think the metafictional stuff here is particularly interesting. The long section at the end was too much.

Do not read this next section unless you have already read both Atonement and Life of Pi; if you have read both, drag your mouse over the blank space to see my comments:

These Booker nominees really need a new gimmick. Life of Pi definitely pulled it off in a more interesting and enlightening fashion, but this trick is getting a little old. I might have been more impressed by Atonement had I not seen this coming a mile away. I feel like I’ve read the same book eight times in the last few years. In Life of Pi I felt like he was doing something different with the gimmick, but I don’t think McEwan is doing anything new here and his story is not otherwise very interesting.

Another spoilery bit that you should skip unless you’ve read Atonement:

Over the last week or so I was worried that McEwan was going to give me a cheater ending like he did with Amsterdam, but the fact that Briony was revising history wasn’t what I was worried about. (I figured that out as soon as we got to Robbie’s story. I’m not sure what clued me in, though; it just felt obvious.) I was just afraid that he was going to make Robbie the villain after all, which would have been cheating. I am still not sure if Marshall as the villain was supposed to be a surprise; I don’t think it was because McEwan practically told us that he was the rapist even before the rape happened.

This is probably my last McEwan novel for a while.

After rereading the novel, I tend to give it more credit and I will even go so far as to say that I liked it and think it is probably McEwan’s best, at least of the books I’ve read. The novel is far more interesting on a second reading, knowing what you know at the end: that information gives far more texture to the character development (although you could argue that there is really only one character in the story) and makes the novel more intellectually satisfying. I still disagree with Ian — without the metafictional frame, this book has no reason to exist, but within that framing McEwan is doing something interesting here.

The Moor’s Last Sigh. Between Vanity Fair and finals, I figure I can fit in one more meaty book or three short ones. I decided to go for meaty and finish out the year with Rushdie, the same way I began it.

Desirable Daughters. This is, without competition, the dumbest book I have read all year. I try very hard to not read dumb books, but sometimes one slips under my radar, and before you know it, I am trapped in an idiotic and illogical mystery novel masquerading as literature.

I don’t want to be unfair to Mukherjee, because parts of Desirable Daughters are beautifully written, and I think there was a very good novel hidden in the origins of this book. But the basic story is both overblown and underdeveloped, with wild character shifts to accommodate the demands of a really dumb mystery plot that she ultimately just drops without any resolution.

I cannot describe the stupidity of the plot to you without giving away major spoilers, which I guess doesn’t matter since the mystery is mostly dropped, and to the extent that is resolved at all, it is resolved in a way that makes no logical sense, no plot sense, no character sense. Desirable Daughters has a great deal in common with a Susan Isaacs novel, in that it concerns an intelligent but bored and unsatisfied middle-aged housewife (here she is 34, but the character feels middle-aged) trying to unravel a mystery, except Susan Isaacs would never let a mystery novel end on such a dumb, unsatisfying note.

I am sufficiently disappointed that I don’t think I will read any more of Mukherjee’s novels, but it does seem like she had an interesting character-based novel here that just got mucked up with an unnecessary thriller angle. Too bad.

Desirable Daughters. I decided I was not in the mood for the O’Neill after all.

Amazon calls it “a masterful meditation on marriage and family ties” and then goes on with this summary:

It begins on a fantastic note: on a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, the narrator’s ancestor, 5-year-old Tara Lata, is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when Tara, the 36-year-old narrator, returns to this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Like her ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee is the youngest of three sisters of a Brahmin family. Although they grew up in Calcutta, Tara and the oldest sister now live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara was married (in an arranged marriage) at age 19 to Bish Chatterjee, a genius who makes a fortune from a cutting-edge computer process. He and Tara are estranged when the novel opens, but when a stranger claiming kinship shows up at the house that Tara shares in San Francisco with her son and her boyfriend, she reconsiders her assumptions about her entire family. In the course of the novel, a sister’s secret and a murder are uncovered, and a near-fatal bombing occurs. Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters is yet another of her magically written, compelling novels.

It sounds like kind of a potboiler but maybe that is what I need at the end of the semester.

After a brief hiatus the Usual Suspects Book Club is returning in January. This year, instead of having a vote on what we plan to read every few months, I decided to just be bossy and make assignments for the year. I selected the books from my own 2005 reading list and from lists posted by others at the forum. Here is the schedule in case you are interested in reading along:

• January: Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party
• February: we’ll be reading erotica in February but the leader for that discussion has not yet chosen a book. (Last year we read a bad romance novel in February; this year we want to go straight to the sex.)
• March: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• April: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave
• May: Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz
• June -July: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• August: Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
• September: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
• October: Wang Chen-Ho, Rose, Rose, I Love You
• November-December: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Because I have read not one single play so far this year.

The Funeral Party. I loved this. At just 154 pages it is barely a novel, and in fact there is something about the way she sketches her characters and places them in a setting that reminds me of a James Joyce short story. The story is terribly sad — a flaky but good-hearted Russian artist in New York is dying at home in the last stages of a disease that seems to be ALS, and his friends and wife and lovers gather in his apartment to see him off. The group is a collection of Russian immigrants, and the story takes place just as the Soviet Union is breaking up. So at the time when they are losing the man who has been the center of their community in New York , they are also conflicted and riveted by the events in their homeland.

I can’t speak for the original Russian, but Cathy Porter’s English translation is just beautiful. Here is one of my favorite passages, one of the moments where Ulitskaya steps back from her characters and writes in more general terms about the lives of the Russian émigrés:

All the people sitting here who had been born in Russian differed in their gifts, their education and human qualities, but they were united by the single act of leaving it. The majority had emigrated legally, some were non-returnees, the most audacious of them ran away across the borders. Yet however their life in emigration had worked out, however much their views differed, they had this one thing in common: this crossed frontier, this crossed, stumbling lifeline, this tearing up of old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours, smells and structures.

As the years went by, even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home. Their reactions, their behavior and their way of thinking gradually altered, but the one thing they still needed was some proof of the correctness of what they had done. The more complicated and insurmountable the difficulties they faced in America, the more necessary this proof was for them. Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so paintful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it — and they all thought different things — their links with it were unbreakable. It was like some chemical reaction in the blood, something nauseating, bitter and terrible.

Shortly after that passage she moves back to her character, describing how they all share a recurring nightmare about returning to Russia and becoming trapped there, unable to find the papers that would allow them to go back to America. I love this part:

Alik had had an amusing variant of the dream. He was back in Moscow, everything was bright and beautiful, and his old friends were celebrating his return in a large flat, which was familiar yet dreadfully neglected. This friendly scrum of people then accompanied him to Sheremetevo airport, but it was nothing like the heart-rending farewells of past years when everything was for ever, until death. When the time came for him to board the plane, his old friend Sasha Nolikov suddenly appeared and pushed some dogs’ leads into his hands. On the end of them a pack of variously coloured little mongrels jumped about, with husky blood in their veins and with curly tails like pretzels. Sasha disappeared and all of Alik’s friends departed, leaving him alone with the dogs. There was nobody he could give them to, and the check-in for New York was already closing. Then an airline official came to tell him the plane was in the air, and he stayed with the dogs in Moscow knowing that this was for ever.

It is just a beautiful little book, and I will have more to say about it in January when we discuss it in the book club.