This Week in Trashy Reads #12

Trashy Read #12: The Shadow and the Star, by Laura Kinsale

Laura Kinsale hangs like a heavy shadow over the landscape of romance writing. She's considered one of the best, and her work is constantly held up as a prime example of darker-toned, long, intricate historical romance. The Shadow and the Star is particularly famous. So I finally caved in and bought a copy of the book to see for myself.

And wow. I can see why Kinsale is so legendary. In the words of internet users everywhere, this book was EPIC. Unfortunately, in describing the plot to you, I expect snickers everywhere. Because, you see, the hero is a trained ninja. Mind you, he's a white dude from Hawaii. Also, this takes place during the Victorian era. Yeah. Luckily, it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. In fact, it all goes over very, very well due to its originality.

I've never read a historical romance like this, although I guess this kind of long, complex plot was once very popular in the genre. This book is so different from anything else I've ever read that I wasn't quite sure what to make of it at first. First of all, it has a heroine you don't see a lot in historicals. Sure, Leda has that annoying pureness and kindness that so many have, but she's also impoverished and from a completely unremarkable background. Secondly, part of the book takes place in Victorian-era Hawaii, which is new to me. Finally, there's the hero, who might be one of the more complicated figures I've ever seen in a romance.

The hero, Samuel Gerard, is rich and super-handsome and complicated, as per usual. But he has a really sad past that includes being used as a sex slave when he was a small child, a plot point that Kinsale handles briefly and gracefully. He was eventually saved by a wealthy noble family from Hawaii, and under the guidance of their butler, Dojun, he became trained in the arts of a ninja. Samuel is pretty legendary in the romance world, for obvious reasons. This isn't your usual historical romance nobleman. But he's not always likeable or even right, which surprised me. Kinsale really knows how to put together a complicated figure that's eerily lifelike: occasionally goodhearted, occasionally a jerk (even creepy), and often playing his cards too close to this chest.

The book somehow manages to be both sweet and prickly at the same time. The story is sprawling and covers a lot of area: Leda's naivety, Samuel's insecurities, the disappointments inherent in both characters' lives, and a plot involving a sword and Japan and unrequited love. It's a lot to handle. And I admit that I wasn't always into it. There were moments I absolutely couldn't get enough, often followed by moments where I yearned for the simple style and plots of someone like Lisa Kleypas. Plus, Kinsale's writing is really descriptive and flowery, which isn't quite my thing.

Yet, in the end, I have to say I enjoyed the hell out of this one. Kinsale is definitely different from Loretta Chase, whose style I tend to prefer. But she created something so unique that I couldn't help but follow along. It's rare that I feel like I'm reading a real book when I'm reading romance. However, The Shadow and the Star felt like a real book, with all its darkness of heart and elaborate feel. This book isn't quite at Lord of Scoundrels levels of awesomeness, but it's pretty darn close.


Next in Trashy Reads: After a nearly two-month-long hiatus, my trashy reading is back in full swing. I have a whole pile of new romances to read (mostly historicals, but also some old-school Nora Roberts), including another Laura Kinsale!

Poem of the Week: "Autumn Song," by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I recently became obsessed with the six-episode BBC series Desperate Romantics. It follows the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, a group of three British Victorian painters. I highly recommend finding a copy of this series. It's funny, a little bizarre, and occasionally melodramatic, much like the actual lives it represents. Even better, a good chunk of the paintings done in these episodes are ones I've seen myself at The Tate London (one of my favorite art museums, I'll add).

One of the painters depicted in this series was also famous as a poet - Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Personally, I've always enjoyed the work of his sister, Christina Rossetti, a lot more. But I still think he has his merits. I'm not going to lie; I find this poem a little hacky (probably because that's how Rossetti comes off on the show). But I think it has a swiftness to it that's quite nice, and it shows a surprising restraint when it comes to wordiness.

But seriously - go out and watch Desperate Romantics. It's fabulous.


Autumn Song, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

Six Days, Six Stories

To celebrate Fitzgerald Week this year, I decided to read one of his short stories every day. From Sunday to Friday, I picked a story each day that was either a)new to me or b)a favorite that I hadn't read in a long time. Here are quick reviews of each story, most of which came from the awesome collection The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, who before his death a few years ago was the leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer.

Sunday - "Babes in the Woods": This was Fitzgerald's first published story and it shows up again in This Side of Paradise. It was an okay story; I wasn't a particularly big fan of it. But you can definitely see his emerging style and thematic obsessions in it.

Monday - "Absolution": This is one of my favorite Fitzgerald stories, but I hadn't read it in years. I enjoyed it more than ever this time around. You can see why this story was considered a kind of prologue for The Great Gatsby, and the final pages reminded me a lot of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (this being a story about small towns and religion, after all). Most of all, I was impressed by the writing, which is really something.

Tuesday - "Crazy Sunday": This is another Fitzgerald story that I hadn't picked up since high school, but which I remember liking at the time. It's about Hollywood and marriage and betrayal. I understood the darkness in this story much better this time around, and I found it a richer experience now. It's pretty prickly for a Fitzgerald story (which are often considered "slick" pieces), and it features some of his most unlikeable characters, which is really saying something.

Wednesday - "The Lost Decade": This super-short piece is actually considered more of a sketch than a story, but it packs quite an emotional punch in its brevity. It was one of the last things he published, and it's definitley autobiographical in its portrayal of a former drunk's realization that he's completely let life pass him by. I really liked this one. A lot.

Thursday - "More Than Just a House": This is the first time I've ever read this story, and I found it really enjoyable. In it, a man becomes tied to three sisters after he saves the lives of two of them, and he's witness to their downfalls, all of which are tied into their rambling old house. I'm still not sure what to make of the ending of this one, but I would definitley read it again.

Friday - "Babylon Revisted": I've probably read this story half a dozen times, at least. It's one of the most painful things I've ever read, but it's so well done that I can't help but love it. Fitzgerald largely stays out of parent-child relationships in his work, but his own issues as a father are on full display in this one. It's sad and beautiful and really quite perfect. Definitely some of Fitzgerald's finest and most poignant writing.

Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

114 years ago today, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

Fitzgerald has been my favorite writer since I was fifteen, but I've always had a complicated relationship with him and his work. He led an extremely imperfect life and had some real weaknesses as a writer. But when he was at his best, he was better than anyone else. His best novels and short stories remain classics of American literature simply because he wrote about Americans so deftly.

Recently, I read Patricia Hampl's great introduction to The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it really hits the nail on the head when it comes to Fitzgerald's complex view towards his roots. He claimed to hate St. Paul, and yet that particular Midwestern, American viewpoint holds in nearly all his work. I've always thought that the line separating great writers from merely good writers lies somewhere in the place of formative experience. Most of my favorite writers are people who write from a particular viewpoint informed by the homes and towns and places from which they came. Fitzgerald is one of these writers. And so, I leave you with another one of my favorite passages from The Great Gatsby that plays into this idea. Here, the narrator Nick Carraway talks about his youth in Minnesota and his the disillusionment he found in the East.

That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am a part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all - Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old - even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

If You Like Fitzgerald...

I've always been a fan of book sites that do the "If you like this, you might enjoy this" stuff. So what's a better time to introduce this kind of post than right now, during Fitzgerald Week! Without further ado, here are five books you might like if you like Fitzgerald (or if you're just looking for a good read).



If You Like Fitzgerald...You Might Enjoy:

1. The Season of Lillian Dawes, by Katherine Mosby: Right on the book's back cover, there's a blurb comparing Mosby to Fitzgerald, so I'm not the first person to find a link between the two. This book is one of my "comfort reads" that I return to again and again. The story of two brothers and the mysterious woman they both take an interest in, it's got a lot of Fitzgeraldian themes: destructive wealth, a character who's basically a more sympathetic, female version of Jay Gatsby, and a lush writing style. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a soft, easy read that makes everything feel like summer.

2. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson: In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I found Fitzgerald's Midwestern viewpoint to be one of his most important characteristics. Robinson is the same, and with a writing style that's equally poetic and graceful. This story, a journal written to the young son of a dying preacher, reminds me of Fitzgerald's story "Absolution" in its depiction of small-town Midwestern values and images.

3. Galveston, by Nic Pizzolatto: One of the things that makes The Great Gatsby so good is its strong sense of place. Both the book's setting and the places its characters come from are important to the story and writing. Pizzolatto's first novel is the same. The descriptions of the Gulf Coast, as well as the sense of the evocative places the characters once inhabited really add to the book's beauty and danger.

4. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway: In real life, Fitzgerald and Hemingway had a very contentious relationship (see Scott Donaldson's wonderful Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship). But this important novel offers a rare glimpse into the world that Fitzgerald knew well in Paris, a place of expatriates known as the Lost Generation. Not to mention that's it just an awesome book that everyone should read at some point in their lives (and which, admittedly, I really need to reread since it's been a few years).

5. Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell: Those of you who are familiar with this nonfiction book's subject (a travelogue of sorts centered around the first three U.S. presidential assassinations) are probably wondering why this made the list. But hear me out: Sarah Vowell has a wonderful love-hate relationship with America that I think closely mirrors Fitzgerald's own thoughts. She manages to celebrate and pick apart her country in equal measure, much like Fitzgerald did so carefully in his own work. Really, I think any of Vowell's books would be Fitzgerald-approved, but I think this is her most entertaining read. Even my younger brother, a non-reader, enjoyed this one.



Well everyone, that's the first installment of "If You Like...." If you have any suggestions for later installments, let me know. I plan to do another one next month.

New to Fitzgerald?

I tend to get over-excited about Fitzgerald. I talk about him and his work all the time, but occasionally, I realize I'm talking about Fitzgerald with someone who's never read any of his work. Don't worry; I won't judge you if you've never read any Fitzgerald. After all, the list of important writers I've never read is downright shameful. But for those of you who might be new to Fitzgerald or might want to introduce him to someone, I thought I'd put together a guide for reading him. Hopefully, at least one person will find this guide useful.

Important Background Information: F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on Sept. 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father had no luck at business or money and the family lived in apartments, but Fitzgerald's mother's family was rich. Due to this wealthy family connection, Fitzgerald attended the best private schools and eventually ended up at Princeton. Although his literary talent began to flourish there, he was a terrible student and never did graduate. Eventually, he met Zelda Sayre, who came from a rich Southern family. She refused to marry him until he had money, so he finished his first (very successful) novel, This Side of Paradise, and won her hand. They lived a crazy life full of parties and hijinks, mainly on the East Coast. During this time, they had their only child, their daughter Scottie. Eventually, Fitzgerald and his family moved to France, where they were part of the infamous Lost Generation of writers and artists in Paris. They also spent a great deal of time living on the Riviera. Their marriage was tumultuous and riddled with personal problems. Zelda was mentally unstable (she eventually ended up in a mental institution, where she would die during in a building fire), and Fitzgerald was an alcoholic. Once the money and fun ran out, the couple returned to the United States. While Zelda lived part-time with her mother and part-time in an asylum, Fitzgerald became a screenwriter who made little money. In December 1940, he suffered a heart attack and died in Hollywood.

Important Themes to Understand: Fitzgerald is often called a chronicler of the Jazz Age. While it's true that his work does settle on a very specific generation of Americans, he goes beyond simply cataloguing their lives. Growing up without money inside a world of wealth had a lot of influence on his work. So often, his books and short stories suggest this central problem. It's as if Fitzgerald both hates the rich and yet wants so badly to be among their rank. Much of his work deals with this conflict, as well as the theme of West vs. East (particularly, the difficulty of Midwesterners adjusting to life on the East Coast). Many of the romantic relationships in his work reflect real life, particularly his marriage to Zelda. Often, his fictional couples simultaneously love each other and tear each other apart. There's not much in the way of happiness in Fitzgerald's work, although he's so good at displaying life in all its complexity that there is often joyful moments amidst the eventual ruin. His later works show a kind of sad resignation punctuated with a desire for change that never happens, much like the story of his own final years.

Where to Start: Obviously, The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's most famous work, and with good reason. It's a masterpiece, so if you're going to read only one Fitzgerald book in your life, make it this one. However, I do think there are easier places to start. The first Fitzgerald book I read was his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Admittedly, what seemed so great about the book when I was young has worn off a bit as I've gotten older and wiser. It seems pretty self-involved at times. But I still believe it is a great place to start because there are a lot more characters and vignettes here than in other Fitzgerald novels, so you're more likely to find something you like. I also think it's good to start with his best short stories. They play with his pet themes and make good introductions to his novels. I think the best ones to start with are "Absolution" (which is actually quite different from Fitzgerald's other short stories but closely related to The Great Gatsby), "Winter Dreams" (nearly all of Fitz's favorite themes are there), and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

Where to Eventually Go: Admittedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald's best short story, "Babylon Revisited," would work as a gateway into his work because it's so good. However, it isn't like his other stories, and I would argue that it's a richer read once you've become more familiar with his earlier work. I also wouldn't start with "May Day," a novella-length story that is more class-conscious than any of Fitzgerald's other work. That being said, I've always had a big place in my heart for "May Day," so it's an eventual must for any Fitzgerald reader. Along those lines, I wouldn't start with Tender is the Night or his unfinished final book, The Last Tycoon, either. I've met a lot of people - mostly lit professors - who think that Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald's best work. I personally don't agree, as I find it well-written and constructed but lacking in the poetry and movement of Gatsby. However, it's one of the most important books of the 20th century, and shows a maturation of subject for Fitzgerald. Because The Last Tycoon is unfinished, it would be impossible to start with. It's an incredible piece, and I honestly believe that if Fitzgerald had lived to finish it, it might have been as good as, if not greate than, Gatsby. But it's not a good place to start at all. Once you've read a few of his books though, you absolutely have to pick this one up. It's really something.

The Must-Reads: So, whether you are new to Fitzgerald or an old hand, there are some of his works that are fantastic and will add something to your reading life. They include my all-time favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, the ambitious and depressing Tender Is the Night, and his best short story, "Babylon Revisted." I also think "Absolution," "May Day," and The Last Tycoon should never be overlooked.


Well, everyone, I hope you found this an informative introduction to the work of one of America's most important writers. Also, let me know if you agree or disagree with any of my choices. I also like to hear what other people think about Fitzgerald.

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Fitzgerald Week!

Hello everyone! It's that time of year again, and once again, this blog will be dedicated to a week long celebration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday (the actual day of honor is Friday the 24th). By now, you all know how obsessed I am with all things Fitzgerald, but this week isn't just about celebrating an alcoholic writer from 20s and 30s. Rather, it's a week for me to ruminate on how much books and language mean to me. It's a week to celebrate how important literature is to who I am as a person and a writer. I just happen to frame that celebration in the context of the man who's been my favorite novelist since I was fifteen. I'll be celebrating the week by reading a different Fitzgerald story every night and including lists and random thoughts related to his work on this blog. In the meantime, to kick off Fitzgerald Week, I thought I'd skip my Poem of the Week and post a Fitzgerald passage instead. And what would be more appropriate than some of the greatest paragraphs Fitzgerald wrote: the ending of The Great Gatsby. This is my favorite passage in all of American literature, and I am happy to share it whenever possible. Enjoy!

from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dreams must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning --

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.