July 14, 2011 – Living Adventurously

I have wanted to read this book for almost a year, since it came out last summer. However, I didn’t know the author, even though she’s written other things, so I waited for the paperback. It is rare that I am this patient. But I was. :)One of the reasons I wanted to read it was the Jane Austen comparison praise it was getting, another was a main character named Emily. (Really, there aren’t that many of us in fiction.)

So when it came out in paperback this week I was really stoked! I did buy it as a book, instead of a NookBook, because the cover is 1) really pretty and 2) it seemed like a “book” buy to me. Some books are Nook Books, and some books are real books, and a book that involves a bookstore, books, and book collecting seemed like a “real” book.

Anyway, here’s the basic plot: Like Sense and Sensibility it revolves around two sisters: Emily, the level-headed, organized older sister, who is CEO of a dot-com start-up, and Jess (short for Jessamine), who is getting her doctorate in philosophy, is wildly idealistic, and can’t “settle down” in her sister’s words. The book begins in 1999—so the height of tech stock madness. It ends in 2002. So…yeah. You know what Big Things happen in between, here. So the book revolves around Jess and Emily living their lives, the mistakes they make, Jess’s job at Yorick’s a used-book store, and the romantic escapades of each.

I don’t want to give a lot away, because this is a really rich, rewarding read. These characters are very real, and very relatable. The book covers a lot of ground—dot-com start-ups; used cookbooks; Judaism; grief; philosophy. I love books like this, that cover a wide range of topics but still keep us grounded in characters and place. (The book is set in the Silicon Valley area and the Boston area.) It’s a book I can imagine reading multiple times, and thoroughly enjoying it more each time. It’s very literary fiction.