I'm a Winner!

Ladies and gentlemen, at 50,121 words, may I present to you a NaNoWriMo winner! I went about writing my novel in fits and starts and spent a lot of weekend days focused on driving the number up, while remaining woefully behind.  The best advice I have for anyone who wants to try this is to jump off the deep end and give it a try.  The amount of concentration it takes is insane, but the very act of finishing makes it seems so much more fun.  And even possible to do again.

Sometime.

In the future.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Fingersmith is a typical Sarah Waters' novel in that she has written a Victorian-style novel set in historical England with interesting female characters, a lesbian love story and a complex plot line.  The complexity, however, of the plot of this novel far outstrips the others that I have read so far.  In Fingersmith, a young orphan, Sue Trinder, is raised by a baby farmer Mrs. Sucksby in a squalid flat in London.  A con-artist gentleman with a gambling problem comes into the house with a plan to swindle a country girl, Maud Lilly, out of her inheritance.  Sue follows the gentleman (known to his friends as Gentleman) to execute the plan and from there, everything is as you expect, until it isn't anymore.

I can't explain more without spoiling the twists and turns, but I will say that I haven't read a 500 page novel this quickly in a long time.  Knowing that there will be twists pushes you through the somewhat unsurprising first third of the book.  This section raises some questions and keeps you guessing, but the real drive comes in the latter two-thirds.  I will leave it at that - this is a provocative suspenseful Victorian novel that you never see coming.

Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire

You may have heard of a little Broadway show called Wicked.  It was originally created from a book by Gregory Maguire who has made quite a name for himself re-telling fairytales and classic stories. I have had Mirror, Mirror on my to-read list for several years and finally got to it over the holiday weekend.

The novel re-tells the classic story of Snow White.  Maguire sets the story in the early 1500s with appearances by Cesare Borgia (the inspiration for Machiavelli's The Prince) and his sister Lucrezia.  Though he brings in history (which he admittedly takes liberties with for the sake of the drama), there also is a layer of the fantastic when it comes to the dwarves.  This re-telling was very entertaining and brought perspective to the tale we know so well as told by Disney.  The way that the mirror, for example, works into the story - a creation by the dwarves with magical elements, but maybe not quite the same magic as we thought - makes Snow White fresh, and almost possible.

I've enjoyed each of Gregory Maguire books from the Wicked series to his retelling of Cinderella (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister).  Finally getting to this one was worth it, both for the story itself and to remind me to keep up with Maguire's latest books.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

I list Jasper Fforde among my favorite authors whenever I get a chance.  He wrote the Thursday Next Eyre Affair series and the Nursery Crimes series.  As many reviewers pointed out, he sort of defies genre and does it in an incredible way.  He creates a fabulous alter-universe which is ridiculously complete and makes you want to run away and hide there. 

His latest series, Shades of Grey, takes a very different turn in similar territory.  In his latest universe, he creates a future world where people are separated into a rigid social structure based on color.  The color, however, is not our present-day focus on the color of one's skin, but rather the color in Fforde's latest book is to be perceived by the eye.  People can only see one color (or two in the case of compounds like Greens and Oranges) and are ordered by the ROYGBIV scale.  There is a whole mythology and history that is created throughout the story to (sort of) explain how the world has gotten to be this way.

Because it is the first of a planned series (at least a trilogy if the book jacket is to be believed), this book is really setting the scene.  There is only a hint of a conflict at the beginning and there is much to dig through before you get to the real mystery and action.  I almost put the book down impatiently, but with faith in Fforde, I carried on and all in all was not disappointed.

Also because of the scene-setting, I can't reveal too much of the plot without ruining the story (the book jacket itself gives away something that happens in the last third of the book. although as you might expect from Fforde, the story itself is still full of twists and turns), but I can say that a young man about to come of age in this strange world is sent to the Outer Fringes of society to learn a lesson (with an official Chair Census to conduct to learn humility).  He learns many and opens all sorts of doors that the powers that be, prefects and the Chromatagensia, want to keep shut.

The Thursday Next books are by far my favorite, but I will look out for future Shades of Grey books.  The witty style of Jasper Fforde makes all of his stories compelling and well worth the read.

Date Night Catch-up

There have been date nights, I'm sure, in the past two months, but I haven't been very good about tracking them.  For the past two weekends, though, we've had nights that definitely qualify.  Last weekend, we did an actually novel thing for us - go out in our neighborhood.  We so often go out to see friends on their turf, knowing that it's not always so easy to get them to come to us.  When we stay home, we really stay home.

So, on the night before Halloween, we opted out of everything but Brooklyn.  And it totally paid off.  We tried a restaurant that I had been to, but that was right up A's alley and found a fun relaxed neighborhood bar with NFL season ticket (clearly more of a plus for A than me, but it means we'll leave the house on Sundays now too).

Then, last night, I was whisked away after work into the world of the Malaysian Street Food Fair in Grand Central.  Laut, among many other restaurants, were there to give Manhattanites a taste of Malaysian food.  We had a fabulous cupcake (Malaysian Coconut and Toasted Almond) that may have been the best ever.

The date night ended up with him heading out to see the boys and with me heading home to the dog and the NaNoWriMo project (update coming!), but it was fun to share the experience together.  A date doesn't have to be a big dramatic evening (or even out of the house), and this was a fun way to spend some time at the end of a busy week.