February Books

This month my book group read Stephen King's 11/22/63.  Two of us were old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and the other two were
infants. (I bought this in ebook format--1,002 pages on my iPad.  The photo is from www.Amazon.com.)

This is the first book by Stephen King that I've ever read.  The first 100 or so pages were pretty entertaining--what one would expect from a very successful and prolific author.  The premise was interesting too--what if someone could go back in time and make sure that Kennedy wasn't assassinated?  The middle of the book dragged, but the pace picked up again nearer 11/22/63.  I'll be curious to find out what the rest of the group thought about it when we meet tomorrow.

My opinion?  While I'm glad that Stephen King writes books that keep people reading in this day and age, he's not an author I would be interested to read again.  Pretty ordinary stuff actually...literature lite.  I was disappointed to read in the Afterword that King had a researcher help him--no wonder he churns out a book or two per year! 

Peony in Love was quite different than the other books by Lisa See that I've read recently.  Carefully researched, the story centers around a 1598 Chinese opera, The Peony Pavilion, whose heroine starves herself to death so her spirit can be with the man she loves.  The girl Peony in this book does the same and the story is told by her ghost.  I'm sure it's a cultural thing, but I had a difficult time with this concept--I just don't believe in ghosts making people do all sorts of things, unless ghosts inhabit our subconscious...

In my line of work, I found this passage from the Author's Note very interesting:

No one knows for sure what killed the lovesick maidens, but it may have been self-starvation.  We tend to think of anorexia as a modern problem, but it isn't.  Whether it was female saints in the Middle Ages, lovesick maidens in 17th century China, or adolescent girls today, women have had a need for some small measure of autonomy...by starving themselves young women are able to shift the contest from the outer world--in which they have no control over their fates and face seemingly sure defeat--to an inner struggle to achieve mastery over themselves and their bodily urges.

Personally, I prefer Lisa See's stories about Chinese people in more recent events.

Happy Leap Day!  Be careful, all you men out there--today's the day women do the proposing!    ;-)