The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Captivating. Intriguing. Spellbinding. This book was all of those things. For about the first three chapters. Then I spent too much time trying to figure out what the twist of the book was. All of the media and publicity surrounding The Wife Between Us focuses on assumptions and the inevitable (but supposedly incorrect) conclusions the reader may make. SPOILER ALERT: it's not so innovative. Seriously over-hyped. After 150 pages I didn't care anymore, and only wanted to finish so that I could be in the know.

"One of my psychology podcasts featured the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It's when you become aware of something - the name of an obscure band, say, or a new type of pasta - and it seems to suddenly appear everywhere. Frequency illusion, it's also called."  This first happened to me when I was moving from Chicago to Lake Powell, Utah.  My friend, G, pointed it out. He didn't know the fancy Baader-Meinhof term. I'm gonna try to lock it in. Ditto "gaze detection," which I've been secretly trying out on my students.

Speaking of students, I teach preschool. So does one of the main characters of this book. That was simultaneously fun and tedious for me.

Otherwise, I would be interested to find out how the authors collaborated on this - did they write together, alternate chapters, take a specific character's POV...? Hrrm.

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

For some reason, I requested this book from the library. Still have no idea where the suggestion came from, but when I picked it up, there was a Miranda July quote on the front. Makes sense. AND THEN I LOVED THIS BOOK ON EVERY LEVEL. My usual bookmark was filled with notes by page 18, so I then turned down page corners (gasp!).

"It's like with improv...True improv is about surprising yourself--but most people won't improvise truthfully. They're afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that's cheating! And cheating's bad for an artist. It's bad in life---but it's really bad in art."

"It's good for an artist to be ridiculous."

"...It would have been so easy to count the ways I had been betrayed by girls, all the ways I had been hurt by them. I could have easily made a list of all the girls to whom I had caused pain. ...But it was not that way with men. ...It was simple. It was men I enjoyed talking to at parties, and whose opinions I was interested in hearing. it was men I wanted to grow close to and be influenced by. It was easy. There was a way in which I felt they would always come home. ...Even if they could be neglectful or forgetful, they were rarely cruel, and though they weren't necessarily so reliable, they were trustworthy in  a deeper sense: I never worried that a man's heart would turn against me--at least not before mine turned against him--and certainly not for no reason at all."

""But--and here is the hope--there is a solution for people of this type, and it's perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work--without escaping into fantasies ...I don't mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and live through the hard work and suffering that inevitable comes with the process. ...

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. Puers don't need to check themselves in to analysis. If they can just remember this--It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing; not what they choose--they might discover themselves save."

"Not something you could control, but something you could love. But if it had left the bathroom and invaded the bedroom, you probably wouldn't have liked it so much. ... I'm doing a lot, what with letting you tape me, but --boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them."

"In the daytime, austerity. In the nighttime, oblivion. Daytime, nighttime. Daytime, nighttime. It went on like that, like throwing a ball from one had to the other."

Data, A Love Story by Amy Webb

The Girl in 6E by AR Torre

This book is bonkers. Read in one day, this one would have slipped through the cracks in my memory if I hadn't written it down. Perhaps because the premise is so disturbing.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

What Malcolm has given us is equal parts history of Stein and Toklas' relationship and an astute criticism of Stein's work. How two Jewish lesbians survived living in Europe during the 30s and 40s is one the larger question posed. Essentially, they moved to the French countryside and rarely spoke of their religious heritage. Evaded the issue, even.

I've long been enchanted with Stein, her brother Leo and their unique brand of living at 27 Rue de Fleurus. The company they kept during the 20s is a veritable who's who, but Malcolm wholly ignores this, aside from a brief mention of Hemingway. The focus is truly on the escape from Nazi terror and the process by which Stein wrote.

Malcolm is seemingly not a huge fan of Gertrude, but she thoroughly investigates her library and fairly sheds light on one of my favorite writers. If you've read my review of the play Gertrude Stein, then you are aware of my adoration of stream-of-consciousness and her heavy repetition of words. I'll spare you a litany of quotes, but share some of how Malcolm classifies the writing.

"This is truly a new way of writing a novel, a novel where the author withholds the characters from the reader. ...The characters resemble shades."

"When she uses a new word it is like the entrance of a new character."

"She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly."

"Although it is possible to finish, it is impossible to sum up."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

I recently finished working on a show, and have started auditioning again, which found me digging through old stuff in search of new monologues. In my pile of scripts, there is Virginia Woolf.

I served as assistant director on this show back in the 90s, with an uber-talented group. We were tight-knit and virtually lived and breathed this script for the requisite 2 months...and then some. I'd challenge that anyone who's worked on this show has found themselves transformed. It's the kind of haunting material that seeps into your being.

Disturbing, lyrical, and filled with the stream-of-consciousness that Woolf is famously known for, I found myself hearing the voices and being wrapped up in the movement of the story. Albee created a world that is absolutely a tribute to Woolf (so much so that the screenplay for the 1966 film changed only two lines-and that purely for the sake of location). This is art.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

There aren't really words for me to express the admiration I have for Virginia Woolf. This, being the book the cemented her place in my esteem, was read in the winter of 1999. I'll let a few underlined passages from my beloved copy be their own review here:

"I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me."

"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction."

"A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history."

"Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband."

"and.....the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment."

"Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind...She will be a poet."

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin

{I posted this and the previous 2 titles with cover photos having every ambition of entering texts soon after. Well, the road to good intention doesn't lead to anywhere. Here we are weeks to months later....I stressed myself out with the stack of books I wanted to read over spring break. In typical Jill fashion, I simply gave up. I honestly haven't finished an actual book since the last week of March (I believe). The interim has found me battling ear infections, stressed out "to the MAX!" and barely able to concentrate beyond the length of a moderately sized interweb article. I've bounced between books while finishing nothing.

I went to my trusty heirloom bookshelf and picked out some old standbys. Those have been my nightly reading, and so the next few forthcoming posts will essentially be a quote extravaganza largely excepting examination.}

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas have fascinated me, from afar, for years. I got this mass market edition of the semi-biographical play years ago and finally read it. Combining my loves of scripts with stream of consciousness, this one hooked me immediately...and sent me running to Black & Read to find anything Stein wrote. Expect a review of Three Lives soon.

The lives that intertwined at 27 rue de Fleurus included the Fitzgeralds, Dali, Isadora Duncan, Cezanne, and Gertrude's brother Leo (of whom I am equally enamored)--en route to THE discovery of both Matisse and Picasso. Fascinating stuff. Reading this play I can smell the tea being served; the ingenuity filling the parlor is as palpable as the flair of those first paintings.

"They were a little worried the publishers about my punctuation which they did not consider satisfactory and they sent a courier to Paris to discuss with me the matter of proofreading. But it is proofread I said What about the question marks he said there are no question marks. I said question marks are out of the question. Anybody with any sense knows a question when he sees one and does not need any little marks to tie his shoes for him. Well surely you will want to put in a few more commas he said he kept looking at me and then quickly looking at Alice and then back at me again. I said it is true she is watching you very closely and after he left Alice counted the silverware she was not fond of publishers no."

"Sometimes at the sittings Picasso would discuss his ideas especially those concerned with cubism. You start with an object he would say and then you strip away all the traces of reality from it. There is nothing to fear because the idea will continue to be present and it is the idea not the object that is important. He was talking about painting of course but his ideas were pertinent to my thoughts on literature at the time Well while he was in Spain I finished the book I was writing but it was written in pencil and it was difficult to read and unfortunately typing is one of the things that makes me nervous ... Picasso said and I agreed that at the time ugliness and the confrontation of ugliness in art was beginning to unsettle people's pictures of life just a bit when it began to break and give way to the explosion that was and is the twentieth century. Always before ugliness was an effrontery to traditional esthetics but once those traditions were thrown into question ... A violin is just a thing but if you play it it becomes a feeling and if you paint it it becomes a feeling too it ceases to be a thing then a painting is never the thing that it is a painting of it is a feeling about that thing and so a painting of a violin without a violin in it can still be a painting of a violin and even a good one it is true nonetheless ... I was not interested in the principles of art ... A child with a piece of chalk and a blackboard is a potential Sistine Chapel in a way now that is not nonsense."

Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf

Guess what? I love Virginia Woolf. Shocker. If you've known me much longer than 2 weeks or ever asked for some sort of "top 5", you already know this. I love Virginia Woolf so much that she shows up on not only my book list, but also plays, movies, and music. Ferreals. Her name has come up twice in conversation recently, so I went to the shelf and revisited my old friend. Here's the deal: I don't generally like short stories. And I'm more apt to be drawn to Woolf's journals or nonfiction (go read Room of One's Own. NOW.) than her fiction. However, in this collection the prose is tilted slightly toward her typical stream of consciousness style, so it still seemed as if she was talking to me. Just to be clear: I LOVE CRAZY LADIES. Her writing is at times so effortless it has the cadence of poetry. Mmm mmm mmmh.

"Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled-and truth?"