Fran: T is for "Is it too much to ask to go out with a bang and not a wimper?!"

So I really wanted my very last letter to be something spectacular.  This post is about how I read a bunch of books by authors with last names that begin with T and how I am still looking for a good one, but will close out the alphabet game anyway.  It's time to feel like I can read other things and not be guilty about taking time away from this project.

1. Ahmet Hamdi Tasnipar, The Time Regulation Institute. 
Tasnipar is billed as the most influential Turkish writer of the modern period so I picked this up as a book which might fulfill the T in a significant manner.  I'm mildly embarrassed to say that I put it down again about 50 pages in.  The main character, Hayri Irdal, is (supposedly) a normal modern man, surrounded by quirky eccentrics, discusses his move from the Department of Justice Medical Facility to the Time Regulation Institute where he works synchronizing clocks and watches and passing fines for time idiosyncrasies.   

Why I stopped: a) the prose style is difficult--Random House describes it in their blurb as

 "Sentences unfold in sinuous coils of multiplying clauses, extended metaphors, hyperbolic exclamations, and an imaginative brio rarely surpassed in modern fiction."  

I think they just wanted to use the word "brio" because I found it convoluted and self-conscious, not possessing of great energy and self-confidence.  b) there is a high level of expectation that you understand modern Turkish history.  In this early section, I really felt I would need to study up just to understand the situation. c) the ideological point of this book is to satirize the modern world and its conflict with the traditional Turkish social/philosophical context.  I have very little tolerance for the bureaucracy that just exists to justify its existence.  I didn't like Seinfeld, either.

2) Karin Tanabe, The List
I like politics.  I like smart young women protagonists.  I should have liked this book.  I stopped about a third of the way in.
Why I stopped: Mostly this book got up my craw in a number of ways.  Adrienne Brown, the young Wellesley grad leaves her job at Town and Country to write for the political info/gossip rag, The Capitolist.  She's unprepared, even after her seasoning as a writer, for the brutal ridiculous demands of the Capitolist (where she's apparently always wanted to work).  Abusive job sites are not for me--file good stories rather than accede to the demand to file a note/story every hour and a half.  She goes home and lives with her super-rich influential family (albeit in the loft above the stables, poor baby); the ridiculous money scene is not interesting to me.  It makes me mad when struggling 20-somethings in movies set in New York live in gorgeous apartments; when I worked for one of the premier SF law firms, making a reasonable out-of-college pay, I lived in a non-descript building in a neighborhood with a poor reputation with furniture from Sal's (the Salvation Army) for my 20-something apartment.  The politics in the book are superficial; no one is in the business of politics or writing about politics because they believe in anything.  And by the time I got to the crux of the plot where Adrienne stumbles on the juicy political affair between a co-worker and a senator, I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters.

3) Anthony Trollope, Ralph the Heir
I'm a fan of 19th c. English writers--Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Gaskell. I'd never read any Trollope.  The description sounded mildly amusing and suitably trashy when I was browsing free downloads beginning with T on the ipad.  Had I known.
Why I am still barely chugging along but have essentially stopped:

Trollope himself called it “one of the worst novels I have written,” that it justified the dictum that “a novelist after fifty should not write love-stories.” In his autobiography, he notes that the two main heroes — both, somewhat inconveniently, named Ralph Newton — have no life, and he purports not even to remember the book’s heroines. (from Rob Horning's review essay linked in the title)

I'd pretty much decided this for myself when I went cruising Google for thoughts on this novel.  I had trouble keeping one Ralph Newton separate from the other.  And Trollope's point was crystal clear--the bad, spendthrift layabout Ralph Newton is going to inherit even though he doesn't deserve to and the good honorable Ralph Newton, on the verge of buying out the estate to inherit it, will lose out.  The women are awful flat characters--the plain elder sister who knows she will get no one and so is resolved to make her sister happy, the sister in love with the bad Ralph, the mysterious (but English blonde) cousin from the West Indies, the daughter of the breeches-maker who bad Ralph may have to marry in order to get money (he doesn't because Trollope has to maintain social propriety--aristocrats only marry aristocrats, not tradesman's daughters).  I haven't gotten far into Trollope's thinly veiled, own political stand for Parliament but I'm having a hard time differentiating among characters that I don't really like.

4) Sarah Loudin Thomas, Miracle in a Dry Season
I finished this book because, crikey, how could I be so miserable at this letter?!
I like romances.  I especially like the sort of romances where the woman has a job that she's trying to succeed at because she loves it and is good at it despite odds against her and in the course of doing that job, finds love with an at-first unlikely man.  I'm modern enough to want a little (or a lot) of physical thrill and traditional enough to want this true pairing to wind up with major commitment/marriage. I don't mind a tinge of prayer/commitment to faith but I want it to be part of a well rounded soul who lives in the world and grapples with modern life.
Why I kept chugging at this until it was eventually done: the writing is good (not great, but compelling enough).  The characters are interesting as is the setting of 1950s small-town West Virginia (Wise, where I've been).  The magical realism of the heroine is potentially really interesting: Perla Long can feed as many or as few as she needs to with the food she's prepared (paralleling Christ's feeding of the 5,000).  It happens in a drought season that puts tremendous pressure on the agricultural community.
What really annoyed me: The main characters are tremendously perfect, even in their imperfection.  Perla's had a child out of wedlock but we get no details of that relationship because Perla's in repentance so we're supposed to forgive her sin and not want to gossip about it.  Her love for the male lead, Casewell Phillips, once slews toward the physical as she looks at his hands and the author immediately shuts that down with a line of how she wouldn't think of that now.  Casewell not only thinks of God but prays on his knees every night without fail.  Eventually, he takes the place of the flawed persecuting preacher (who leaves town rather than face his sin, which is largely opposing Perla out of pride and misunderstanding of her God-given gift).  There is a tremendous sense in this book that the reader cannot hope to be as good as the good people and wouldn't want to be as flawed as the flawed people.  I had tremendous trouble identifying with the characters--which in a good romance is something you want.

So technically, I finished the letter T and thus am at the end of my alphabet reading.  Did I pick up a T author at the library yesterday? Yup.  Because I still haven't found what I'm looking for.