Reads for Fun

Jack CBR$ #2 The Mephisto Club - Tess Gerritsen

2012-01-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

This book came pretty highly recommended by a friend of mine who I have come to learn shares a great deal in common with me idea wise, not so much entertainment wise. In her defense, straight up mystery is not generally my cup of tea, and I do know that Tess has a legion of fans out there so I’m certainly not in the majority on this opinion.

The Mephisto Club centers around two recurring characters in Garretson’s fiction: Maura Isles and Jane Rizzoli. Jane is a detective and Maura is a medical examiner. They work cases together and in this case, it opens with a gruesome murder early Christmas morning. It's not just any murder, though. "I have sinned" is written in blood, in Latin, on the wall at the scene of the crime. That’s not all, the body has also been ritually dismembered and displayed. Clearly, this is not your standard murderer. As the plot develops there are additional murders, one on the steps of the home where the Mephisto club is meeting that very night.

Over the course of the novel, the two women chase clues trying to solve the murder as Maura is slowly pulled towards the club, who, it turns out, searches out and destroys evil (read demonic evil) all over the world. There are several members, some of whom don’t survive the narrative, but honestly their introductions and reason for being in the club are so rushed I cared not a bit when any of their member got picked off.

I can only assume that this novel relies heavily on the fact that many readers have followed these characters from the beginning. I’ve read quite a bit about what strong female character Jane is and that’s honestly one of the reasons my friend suggested the book. I don’t see it. I thought both female leads were just shy of cliché. There appears to be no depth to Jane other than the haunting experience that happened in some other book with some other killer. The most interesting thing about Maura is that she’s having an affair with a priest, excuse me if I don’t find that very interesting. Maybe in 1956 it would have added to tension and mystery but 2012, c’mon.

Ultimately, the truth is I only finished the book because I was stuck on a plane with nothing else on the Kindle I hadn’t already read. I was bored for a good portion of the book and found the ending to be totally expected and uninspired. I don’t want to spoil it, but I would be shocked if the final 30 pages surprise any readers. Then like a bad movie, it finishes with confirmation that there are more devilish folk to come….

CBR4 Book #1 Await your Reply – Dan Chaon

2012-01-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try again. I read well over 52 books last year and reviewed 10. Ugh. This year I will do better!

Await Your Reply is a novel told in short sections about various individuals whose lives eventually intersect. It is one of the rare books written this way where I didn’t have full story lines in which I had no interest. Often times in books with multiple stories I find myself skimming one of the stories to get back to the one that compels me. That’s not the case in this novel, each story line is equally interesting.

The major story lines include Ryan, who we meet first, as he’s rushed to the hospital with his hand in an ice cooler next to him. He and his father have a very complicated relationship, which plays out over the course of the novel tying Ryan up in knots about the nature of family and how you become who you are. It’s a complicated spin on nature versus nurture.

Next, we have Miles who is traveling (literally) to the end of the Earth to find his twin brother, who he knows to have schizophrenia, who has been missing and radio silent for the last four or five years. Miles struggles with is possibly misplaced family loyalty and the feeling of loss he has over his missing twin. This might be the one place in the novel where there seems to be undue emphasis. I could be wrong, and I’m not a twin, but if I woke up tomorrow and one of my sisters was just gone you can guaran-damn-tee that the landscape of my life would change forever. That said, the idea that you could be identical to someone with a mental disorder in every other way is compelling. Wally Lamb flushed the premise out quite differently but with astounding grace in I Know This Much Is True.

Next, we have Lucy Lattimer, a recent high school graduate who has run off with her History teacher. It’s not long after they’ve left that the truth about the History teacher starts to present itself. He is not who he has claimed to be, but as the story progresses the reader learns that Lucy has shared so little of herself, and intentionally held back so much, that the same could conceivably be said of her.

Those are the three major story lines and each one is a exploration into identity on multiple levels. It’s is giving up too much to say, for instance, that Ryan is in the business of identity theft – even as he’s struggling to understand his own identity.

The novel is ultimately, without being polemical or preachy, an exploration of identity construction. What does that name on your driver’s license mean? To whom does it matter and why? And more importantly, if I can convince you that I’m someone else and I enjoy it and so do you who’s to say I’m not that someone else? How much of that is betrayal and how much of that is just an extension of the kind of games we play when we present our best selves on a first date or a job interview? What are the consequences?

You know long before the end of this book where it’s going to end up, but that doesn’t make the reading any less enjoyable. Chaon’s prose are a pleasure to read. He has a gift for choosing the perfect word when it really matters and he never condescends to his reader. I like a book that expects me to keep up.

CBR #10 - The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

2011-03-15T17:47:00.001-07:00

I first read this novel many moons ago when I was about 18 years old. My eyes are so different now.

Many people know the basic story. It's a semi post-apocalyptic story where the civilization of Gilean has instituted martial law. Women have lost all rights. They can't have jobs, control money, or survive on their own. Not only that, they have been reduced to their reproductive potential. Wives are generally married to important men and barren, Martha's are women who are useful but can't reproduce and take care of homes, handmaids have viable ovaries and have sex with husbands trying to give barren wives children. Creeptastic. The women have little if any communication with one another, resentment is rampant, and everyone is afraid. It's only been four years - all of these women remember the time before.

Offred, the protagonist, is a handmaid in the home of a Commander (of what she does not know) who clearly remembers her life before. The story vacillates between her current day horror and the year or so leading up to marital law: the day her accounts were frozen, the day she lost her job, the day she and her husband tried to run with their daughter. As I sit typing this, reeling over "criminal miscarriage" legislation, it's creepier than ever.

This book does an amazing job of many things. One is, it demonstrates the loneliness of all the women, cut off from each other, reduced to function, in a way that is heart breaking. Imagine the relief in speaking in full sentences in your normal tone of voice. Can you even. Or imagine having, after four years, to make yourself think about spelling again. Atwood's portrayal of how basic skills are lost with disuse is mind boggling and probably true. Atwood's protagonist spends most of her time trying not to think, concentrating on the simplest things: a fingernail, a cloud. Without even thought to keep you company, the world is very lonely place, even in close quarters.

Offred eventually gets an opportunity to expand her life a little. The Commander involves her in life outside the house - either as an act of mercy or one of control, your reading may vary - and Offred begins to want again. To feel what it is to have power, no matter how limited. She takes risks, albeit calculated risks. Most importantly she starts to think again. Not just remember, but process, create in her mind, plan. I guess that's suppose to be the uplifting part.

There are a lot of moments in this book that suck the wind out of you and not all of them are what you'd expect. The sex act in this culture is it's own special kind of sickness must it's not the most sickening moment, at least not for this reader. There are many others, in the women who help to control other women, the betrayal among those who have no choice but to trust, etc etc. The most frightening moment for this reader though, comes in the middle of the narrative, Offred is remembering the early days when things began to change - she is bereft, afraid, already losing herself and in a moment of clarity that changes everything, she realizes her husband doesn't mind. What, if anything, can a subjected population do if even their allies are complacent?

CBR #9 - A Star Called Henry

2011-03-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

Henry Smart has had a hell of a time. This is the first book in a trilogy (of which I read the third first) by Roddy Doyle. It follows the life of Henry Smart from his earliest years in Dublin during the Troubles to his retirement from the IRA. Henry is the first child to survive, in a family that would have been immense, born to impovershed parents in Dublin. His father is a bouncer at the local whore house and sometimes heavy man for the local gangster. His mother is aging five years for every one at home with the ghosts of her children who didn't survive.

Little Henry first hits the streets at age 3 and is already mean. He grows up on the streets, leaving home with his little brother in tow by the time he is 8. His Mother is incapable of caring for them and his father has run off, or died, either way it's two little boys on the streets. At first, being a middle class American born in the late twentieth century this seems hard to believe, but Doyle's writing is so convincing that even I can picture it painful as it is.

Henry eventually gets off the streets and into hiding as an early soldier in the IRA, he has what Cusack called "a certain moral flexibility" and it gains him position in the burgeoning army. Henry works hard, falls in love, commits murders, runs and runs and runs. All the while he maintains a sense of humor and loyalty to his cause. Until he can't anymore. And then he just absolutely cannot. The plot description doesn't do this book justice.

I don't know much about the troubles or the IRA honestly, although I'm enamored by it. This novel hints at the strategies of the IRA and how they were successful in ways that require that I do some research and see if they're true (I love that in a novel). Did the IRA really draw the English intentionally into peaceful neighborhoods and trick them into wreaking havoc, murdering citizens, in order that public opinion turn against them? Did the IRA knowingly sacrifice their own when it suited them, or defend their own for crimes equal to any British peeler?

Whether intentional or not, this novel manages to maintain the romance, on some level, of the Irish Independence movement; however, at the same time it is a gripping narrative about the use and abuse of those that served. Men like Henry with nothing to lose carry a revolution on their backs until slowly one by one they are betrayed, disillusioned, or killed. As Henry goes about his work, he slowly comes to realize that he is little more than a beast of burden for a movement whose intentions may have been true, but whose execution, in the end, is wanting.

The narrative voice is so strong and so compelling that the story comes across much more intensely and ferociously than this review would suggest. It has moments of bone crushing sadness and pure elation. Henry is a brute, but you love him, as you're suppose to, even when you know he is wrong.

Jack CBR-III #8 Sufficient Grace

2011-02-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

Apparently I can't count and I'm too lazy to go redo it. So, here we are at number 8.

Sufficient Grace by Darnell Arnoult. Apparently, although I was choking to death on Faulkner by the time I got out of grad school, I can't get away from Southern novels. Well, Southernish. This novel takes place between two neighboring towns and tells the stories of two families, one black, one white, brought together by the protagonist's slow decent into schizophrenia. There's no spoiler involved to tell you that one day Gracie wakes up, prepares her house, cuts up her credit cards, gets in the car and drives away from home, thirty year marriage, and grown daughter. She is found sleeping on the grave of Arty, dead husband of Mattie, and son of Ma Toot, in a town just across the state line. The two black women take her home and care for her. The rest of the story unfolds as the supporting characters each deal with Gracie's (who goes by Rachel at Ma Toot's house) madness and the effect it has on their lives.

There were two things that really struck me about this book. First, Gracie/Rachel's decent into madness is described in terms of the voices she hears and sometimes the specifically odd things they tell her. That, in and of itself, not so striking. But, the novel is peopled with other people who listen to voices of their own, and yet clearly aren't crazy. The juxtaposing of crazy voice versus the little messages we all hear from day to day is at times riveting. It made reading about this type of illness as accessible in a lot of ways.

The second thing is the richness of the characters and their individual development. Ed, Gracie's husband, who she leaves without ever looking back, undergoes two significant and completely believable transformations. Not only that, all the while, he struggles to do what he can to relate to his wife, support her, and find a way to bridge the disassociation between them. Ed and Ma Toots are two most developed characters in the novel and both their stories are compelling, but it's the humanity and level of detail given to even the tertiary characters that makes this novel so compelling. The aching, beautiful secretary, who has always wanted Ed's attention, in only a few pages comes alive and is more more interesting and sympathetic than the stereotype you might expect (and get) elsewhere. Ginger, Gracie's daughter, is equal parts irritating and relatable. Her fear of what family crazy means and the impact it will have on her specifically is sometimes moving, her impatience with her "crazy" mother in the closing chapters brings some good, believable comic relief.

Another interesting thing is the way the book explores how these people respond when new roads are opened up before them. Ed and Gracie have been married 30 years. It seems like all the decisions about their life have been made until she leaves and then Ed gets to make new ones. Mattie is grieving for her husband and has decided to make it a full-time endeavor until the presence of Gracie (and others) make her rethink the paths that may be available to her. Each character comes to know something new about themselves, something brimming with potential Some of the stories tie up a little more neatly necessary, but even still you can believe it might, could happen that way, if you listen really hard to the little voice inside.

CBR-III #5 Faithful Place - Tana French

2011-01-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

This is the third of Tana French's novels that I have read and I have enjoyed them all. This last installment is similar in some ways to the first two, but it takes the feel of the other two and moves in a new direction.

Faithful Place, unlike the first two novels, is less focused on the solving of a crime and more focused on the place where it happened and the people it happened too. Frank Mackey is a detective from Faithful Place, who left twenty two years ago and never looked back, of course, until now. The single sibling of four with whom he still speaks calls him in for an emergency: a suitcase has turned up in an abandoned house at it looks to be his high school sweet heart's case. The one who left him (and apparently the case) behind the night they were suppose to run away. Frank rushes to drop of his nine year old daughter back off with his ex-wife and heads directly for Faithful Place. We learn a lot in those opening pages.

The mystery of who killed Rosie Daly unravels slowly. And maybe it's a result of having read her other two novels so recently, I knew who did it relatively early. The beauty is it just didn't matter. French does such an amazing job with a slew of damaged, frightened, bitter, scared characters, most of whom are still on Faithful Place to this day, that the mystery takes second place behind the unraveling of all these characters. French treats them all with such honestly that even the most beastly among them is compelling and on some level understandable - not sympathetic - but understandable.

I have few quibbles with this novel, most probably aren't worth mentioning. There is however a revelation that seems a little too easy and the happily ever after potential unrealistic (especially given the rest of the novel), but it's a smaller side plot and not the main story. As heartbreaking and some of the other side plots end, they are true to what you'd expect from the people involved even though you hate that you even expected it, and I love an author who can pull that off without disappointing.

French's novel has a lot to do with family and loyalty, and the pain that comes with both. And yet it demonstrates beautifully why even when given an escape people continue to come back for more.

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

2011-01-02T09:29:00.000-08:00

What a way to ring in the new year. So I was completely out of things to read, and owe the library enough in fees that they've temporarily suspended my borrowing privileges. So, my husband's Mom sends him Unbroken for Christmas and with nothing else to read I pick it up. Don't get me wrong, I loved Seabiscuit but I tend to avoid anything war related; however, my husband convinced me it was a book about an escape during the war, not a real war story. Boy was he wrong.

It is testament to Hillenbrand's writing that I finished the book. The first 75 pages, before you get anywhere near the war, are so compelling and the characters so masterfully brought to life that there is no way you can stop reading this book until you come to the end. You have to know what happens to Louie and the rest of the group no matter how painful, and it is very, very painful.

The story follows Louie Zamperini, delinquent turned Olympic hopeful in the opening pages of the novel. He is staggering in his success and has all the makings of a star. However, Pearl Harbor happens and the Olympics are put on hold and Louie is put in plane.

To tell the order of events for the rest of the novel would serve more as spoiler than anything else. I will warn (spoiler coming) that Louie spends no fewer than 200 pages of this book in POW camps and worse. Hillenbrand describes the events in those places with such detail that I cried through huge sections of the book and several times had to abandon it for an hour or two. She follows a pattern where just after describing the most mind numbing, painful experiences she follows with equally detailed stories of how the men maintained moral, where they found hope, how they kept breathing. For this reader it wasn't enough, but I would guess for many it will be.

This book is definitely testament to the power of the human spirit. The things those POWs overcame, the very fact that they came home and led "normal" lives after the war is nothing short of awe inspiring. When I started reading this book, I thought everyone should read this. It brings to light so many things that so many of us don't dare to think about, but having finished it I don't know if I would read it again.

Carry Me Home - Sandra Krig

2010-12-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

Book #3 CBR-III

Carry Me Home takes place in 1940, in rural Wisconsin, although it could just as easily be many other places in the country. The rural community Krig creates is as lush and interesting as any community about which I've read in years. Every character leaves an impression that lingers, hanging around long after they've left the page. The rural setting combined with the not-quite-right teenage protagonist will undoubtedly result in comparisons to Faulkner. I generally hate that anything rural gets related back to Uncle William, but in this case the comparison is probably merited. Although this narrative is simpler, Krig has some bone crushing observations via the innocence of Earwig, the teenager in question, that can't help but to put one in the mind of Benjy.

The novel hinges on the relationship between Earwig and his big brother, Jimmy. Jimmy, fiercely protective of his younger brother helps Earwig to carve out a life in his small town where he balances for most of the novel between child and man, although his mental capacities will never reach full maturity. The reader watches Earwig struggle with the responsibilities of almost adulthood, while still getting the "pass" among many of the town's citizens of a child. As a result, he is privy to many interactions, conversations, and information that he might not otherwise be. It's the processing of all that information and figuring out what to do with it that drives Earwig. When his brother goes off to war the simplicity and innocence with which he worries for him is heart breaking. As he watches the town he loves buckle under the pressure of the war and their missing boys he seems to be the only one who can understand what's really going on.

As I type this, I realize it might sound trite. It is not. Krig has a wicked control of the language and although there are plenty of places where this story could fall into sticky melodrama, it doesn't. Jimmy returns from the war changed in ways that only Earwig refuses to ignore. Instead of coming across as cheap commentary on the "wise-ness" (is that a word) of the innocent, it comes across as nothing more than the result of the power of the love between Earwig and his brother. Earwig doesn't understand everything, but he understands enough, and more importantly, he understands a lot more than most.

# 4 The Swan Theives - Elizabeth Kostova

2010-12-27T17:53:00.000-08:00

I read The Historian last year and I loved it. I love a well written book, I love a little surprise, and I just think anything vampire related is a little bit sexy. I found The Swan Thieves in the airport on the way home from another crappy three days in Houston and it made the 2 hour delay almost tolerable, although it probably shouldn't have lasted that long...

TST, succeeds on a lot of levels; however, it is not as good as The Historian . Like her first novel, this one has multiple narratives, descriptions that border on laborious, and a love story (two, actually). There are two narratives at work in this novel, although the second one isn't introduced until almost a hundred pages in, and although it turns out to be compelling, it served as nothing but distraction for this reader for at least a hundred pages if not more.

History is at the center of Kostova's first novel and Art is at the center of this one. All the main characters in the novel are artists, and specifically, painters. The novel focuses on Marlowe, a painter turned Psychiatrist. Marlowe is treating Oliver, a painter who recently attacked a painting, was arrested, forced into care and refuses to speak. Oliver has had two significant women in his life, both painters, with whom Marlowe confers trying to untangle the mystery of Oliver's behavior and refusal to communicate. The second narrative, introduced via letters in Oliver's possession, also involves painters. A young woman painter and her older male mentor, at the turn of the century in France. Their narrative also involves a mystery and it requires solving the 100 year old mystery to unravel Oliver's current day issues.

Kostova spends a significant amount of time waxing poetic in this book and generally she has such astute control of the language I don't mind. However, there are sections that begin to lag, where the lack of action or growth from the characters becomes frustrating no matter how compelling the sentence structure. I imagine lovers of Jane Austen and her ilk will be more patient with Kostova than the general public. It's not always what happens that's important but what doesn't or rather how it doesn't. Kostova seems to have nailed that, at length.

The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb

2010-12-27T17:35:00.000-08:00

This is my first installment for Cannon Ball Read III.

I loved Wally Lamb's previous two novels, although it took me some time to embrace his second, so I was excited to begin The Hour I First Believed . I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I have the same love hate with this book that I had with I know this Much is True . I started that book four times before I finished it and I only stuck it out after both my Mom and my Sister swore me a blood oath that I would love it if I could get through the first 100 pages. That's a lot of pages to force yourself through, but they were right and I was so glad I did. TFHIB was the opposite. I found the first half totally mesmerizing and the second half lost me a little.

The story center on Caelum, a school teacher and his wife, Mo, who survives the events of Columbine. They are both employed at the school, but Caelum is out of town when the massacre happens. The first half of the book centers around Mo trying to regain her sanity and Caelum trying to navigate living with this new woman who used to be his wife. I found it unbelievably compelling. The ways in which Caelum and Mo cling to a relationship that is fraying from every direction, and which we slowly learn may not have been the kind of relationship songs are written about anyway is convincing. As is Mo's struggle to deal with real life after her tragedy. Lamb depicts her in a way where as the reader you half want to shake her and say snap out of it and half realize that might just be exactly how you would react yourself.

The problem is, the tragedies just keep coming and eventually it seems like too much. The point of the collateral damage is compelling, but begins to feel false. At the same time, Caelum begins his epic quest for meaning. His quest parallels that of his grandmother, whose letters and journal are discovered in the matriarchal home and then researched and presented as a doctoral Dissertation by the women's studies tenant to whom he rents his attic. Really? The sections of Caelum's history, via letters etc is distracting and doesn't do much to propel the story. I found myself speed reading through them wanting to get back to Caelum's "real" life.

All in all, it's a good book. It is, of course, also a long book. Although it didn't keep me riveted all the way through, I do think the opening half and the moments throughout that look closely at victimhood and recovery and the small steps one must make to keep living are so vividly and convincingly told that it would be a miss not to read them.

the girl who stopped swimming Joshilyn Jackson

2010-07-21T16:09:00.001-07:00

My mother often complains after she reads a book I've recommended: Why are they always so dark? She and my step call me twisted sister. So last weekend when I plucked this book from her shelves, I figured I was in for some kind of family drama, but one where all's well that ends well. The fact that this book was in her house can only be explained by what I confirmed three days later: she hasn't read it. She picked it up and hadn't gotten to it yet. Unfortunately, I had to tell her not to read it, but not because I didn't like it.

TGWSS is about family, dysfunction, ghosts, abuse, guilt, hurt, you name it. And it's all swirling around the edges of a decent whodunit. The story centers on Laurel, who sees ghosts. She is married to David and has a daughter Shelby. She also has a lunatic sister Thalia, to whom she has not spoken in years. The book opens on the night the ghost of a little girl who drowned in Laure's pool appears to her. Her husband calls in her mother for reinforcement, but she immediately jumps in the car and rushes to find her sister for help. It establishes a lot about their familial relations.

The two sisters set to trying to unravel the mystery of how the dead girl ended up in Laurel's pool, and all the while Thalia is trying to unravel Laurel's marriage. In the interim, Laurel's relationship with her mother finally unravels for good. There is a lot of unraveling going on.

There is also a lot of ugly. Big secrets, the kind you've grown to expect, lurk in the closets of Laurel and Thalia, their mother, Laurel's daughter, pretty much everyone. What's compelling is that even when you KNOW what the secret is, the reading of it does not disappoint and the characters are not reduced to placeholders you read about in so many other novels. The fact that Jackson does this so well is doubly important because it also sets the stage for the kind of awful at the end that you probably didn't see coming and wouldn't be able to stomach, except for on second though you did see it coming, a little bit. Jackson just takes you further than you expected to go, and then some.

Jackson does a great job of capturing the complexities of relationships. Most evidently in the Thalia, Laurel, David triangle. Thalia can't understand David, who won't understand Thalia. They share Laurel resentfully. But the triangle provides some poignant moments where Jackson is able to display truths in relationships that are usually barely hinted at. What does infidelity look like? To whom? Is it different for different relationships?

Most interesting for me, because I love a ghost story, is how the novel explores what we do and don't see and how and why and where. Once you open your eyes, you can't ever close them again against what you saw. Thalia and Laurel learn that the hard way.

The Summer We Fell Apart Robin Antalek

2010-06-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until I was 30 that I realized I knew people who didn't like their families. People who had siblings with whom they would not speak or parents they despised etc. Somewhere in my 30s I realized my sisters and I are in the minority of families for all generally liking each other and seeking each other out on a regular basis. That's not to say it's always smooth and friendly, but if push comes to shove we are a united force against any outsider every time, even if it's our parents. The crazy thing is we are like that and we weren't abused as children. Go figure.

The Summer We Fell Apart is a novel about the four mostly grown children of two wildly incompetent parents. It's told in sections, one per child (with a final chapter narrated by Mom), and although the time frames of each section occasionally overlap, on the whole they span enough time to cover about a 15 year period in the kids' lives. It's not a great fifteen years for all of them.

The first section is narrated by the baby of the family, Amy. She's about 17 at the time. I find in novels like this one I'm often times so influenced by the first character's view of things it's hard to see the others experience clearly. That is is definitely the case in this story. Not only is Amy first, she's the youngest and least complicated at this point in her life. Her narration seems more objective for its innocence. She sets the stage for a summer where everything changed and then jumps forward to nursing her father on his deathbed. Clearly, her damage has made it impossible for her to abandon him the way he has her.

The second section is all about George, his story gives us a little better look at Amy and a deeper look into the failings of their shared parents. I like him because Amy does and because he seems most normal, except for when he doesn't. George has a host of his own problems his burgeoning affair with the father of one of his best students among them. George reinforces for the reader that no matter how fucked up family and love can be, they are so much better than being alone.

Next we have the older sister Kate, who is the overachieving, successful, disdainful one of the group. Her narration does less to propel the understanding of the family shortcomings than any of the others. Partially because she still idealizes her failed father and partially because her experience if his failure is pretty middle of the road standard Daddy doesn't like my boyfriend kind of stuff. Amy doesn't like Kate much and honestly you can't blame her. The insight into her life does little to make her more sympathetic, but she seems just unlikable rather than damaged or broken.

Finally, we get in a few short pages Finn, the alcoholic middle child who's the most compelling and gets the least space. Finn teeters throughout all the stories on the brink of the abyss (even as a teenager) until he finally drops over the ledge. Another author would have let him die. This one didn't.

In the end the novel, Mom gets to weigh in. There is a final chapter where all the damage comes to stay in the same house to celebrate a joyous occasion and for the first time Mom sees what she might have lost. You can respect her though because she doesn't try to make amends or lament and beg forgiveness, she keeps on with what she's got and hopes for more.

On the whole it's an entirely enjoyable read. The characters slide almost into caricature in a few places: Kate is described as having a look on her face like she smelled something bad, sucked lemons, and injured her eye all within a few short pages. We get it. She's dour. There are a few descriptions that sound a little like a grad school writing course: "He spent the afternoon crashing [from caffeine] like a novice skier on a black diamond trail." Ugh. But, on the whole the novel is compelling and you want to see where these kids end up. If they find something on to which they can hold. Having their primary bond with both parents be so tenuous, especially when those parents are present and just choose not to be available messes with each of the Haas children in different ways, but ways that sometimes give them the tools to understand each other; and sometimes, as with Kate, they don't.

Natural Flights of the Human Mind Clare Morral

2010-06-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Natural Flights of the Human Mind is a novel set in the present day in the seaside town of Devon. It centers on two central character, Stracker a 50-something year old hermit, who lives in a lighthouse; and Imogen, a 40-something school caretaker. Both characters are initially described in ways that can only be termed unattractive, as they struggle to hide from their miserable pasts.

When Imogen inherits a cottage from her little known Godfather in Devon, she rushes to the seaside town to collect her bounty. Unfortunately, she finds the cottage in near ruins. Enter Stracker, who despite his refusal to speak to anyone in Devon for the last 25 years wanders into Imogen's yard and sees her struggling to fix the roof. They meet, annoy and offend one another, and move on. Stracker then inexplicably returns to her cottage during the week to make repairs for her unsolicited. As a reader, I'm already struggling. For the life of me, I cannot make the leap this character does in the opening 50 pages. He's been basically silent, keeping to a routine and obsessed with the number 78 (potentially the number of people he killed maybe accidentally) for 25 years until an unattractive, spiteful, rude woman unleashes her anger on him. It just doesn't seem quite right.

The two eventually become a kind of team, working on Imogen's little cottage and they eventually find a bi plane in the barn on the far end of the property. The site of which sends Stracker reeling. The mystery of the 78 slowly starts to unravel and the reader learns about the accident involving a small plane piloted by Stracker and a commuter train and why Stracker blames himself. Simultaneously, Imogen is working out her own demons, living down the memory of a husband who left one day (on the train) and never came back.

In the meantime, Stracker is exercising his demons by writing to the families of his victims in a vain and self-important attempt to "not let them be forgotten" as if. Several of the families figure out who he is, despite his ruse that he's a reporter, and they eventually come looking for him. At this point all plausibility, which was wanting from the start, completely breaks down. It's just completely unbelievable.

The writing of the book though, is beautiful. The prose are compelling, the dialogue (interior more so than shared) resonates in ways that makes the characters more compelling than they might be otherwise.

Bloodroot Amy Greene

2010-06-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

Wally Lamb said about this book, It has everything I look for in a novel." Pretty tall praise if you ask me.

I liked this novel, but honestly, for me, it didn't quite deliver. It's a multi-generational story about a family in the Tennessee Smokey Mountains living under a curse. The novel is broken into three parts covering the 3 generations, each with it's own fixation on Myra, the child born who should have broken the curse.

The early part of the novel, narrated by Myra's grandmother Byrdie, is vivid and engaging. Byrdie has the "gift" she inherited from the granny women. The description of her love for Myra, juxtaposed against that of Douglas, who loves Myra from a far during her childhood portrays Myra as an almost enchanting character. One wonders about what gifts Byrdie may have passed on to her. Unfortunately, the enchanting set up is lost after the first section as the novels circles in further and further on the hurt and disappointment suffered by the Lamb family.

The second section is narrated by the now adult twin children of Myra, who suffer in their own ways from the fall-out of her decisions. Although the reader still doesn't know the source of these decisions. The children are adrift, separated from each other in childhood yet still spiraling in the circle their heritage seems to have destined to them. In the final pages of the novel, I think we are suppose to find them hopeful, and I might be able to see it with Johnny, just a little, but I don't with Laura, at all.

The final section of the novel gives a first hand account of Myra and her husband John Odom. I have to be honest, I was disappointed here. Greene has a true gift for capturing horrific moments, of rendering the inexcusable part of every day life in a way that can be breath taking. However, the violence feels almost forced and this reader hoped for more than lustful romance turned sour when fermented in broken dreams and alcohol. I have to be honest, there also seems to be a kind of cultural acceptance, and community complicity about the way things are. At one point, Myra tells her granny, who comes willing to save her from her atrocious marriage, "I made my bed." A similar attitude resonates among other characters as well. It made this reader expect something more, some exceptional pull or force, most likely borne out of the mountain that held things as they were. The beginning of the novel seems to set up something like that, and more. There were moments, early on in the novel that reminded me of Gloria Naylor. I anticipated that kind of subtle magic and it never came.

The novel, is if nothing else, a successful love letter to the mountains. Greene brings the mountains to life in a way that makes you want to see them, breathe them really. The mountain is almost a character itself in the novel, pushing and pulling other characters in one direction or another.

The Dead Republic Roddy Doyle

2010-06-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

I've done it again. I hate this. I find a book at the library, it's part of a trilogy or series - the end of it usually - and the library doesn't have any of the rest of the books. This is the case with TDR. I checked it out anyway. Now I'm going to have to find the other books in the series.

TDR begins with Henry Smart returning to Ireland after a long hiatus, film crew in tow intent on filming the movie of his life. Turns out the movie they are making is a watered down, romanticized version of his life. It's more a love letter to Ireland than a true telling of his story. You see, Henry Smart was part of the IRA in early days. There was nothing romantic about his years there. He was a good, successful soldier on whom the organization eventually turned. He lost his wife and children while they were on the run, along with his leg. The reader learns all this through flashbacks where Henry remembers how he narrated his story to Tom Ford, the movie producer in love with Ireland, over the course of three years.

On the way to Ireland, Henry finds the updated "fixed" script of the movie of his life and sees what Hollywood has done to his story. Instead of sticking around to consult on the IRA sections of the movie, he takes off and carves out a life for himself in a suburb of Dublin. First, he's a gardener until he becomes the handyman of a boys school and eventually retires. Pretty normal stuff, except of course, Henry isn't normal. He's a famous former IRA member and he hasn't returned unnoticed.

Even as an old man, Henry finds himself entangled again in Irish politics. He is not unhappy to be there. The more involved he gets, the more the mysteries around his early involvement and the actions of the IRA over the last thirty years unfold. The machinations behind the scenes sometimes seem to be a bit much, but overall the story is compelling and Henry is a totally enjoyable narrator.

I'm sure having read this first will affect the my reading of the earlier novels, but I can imagine Henry in his youth based on Henry in old age and I want to read more.

The Last Witchfinder - James Morrow

2010-06-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to like this book. I really did. I started and stopped three or four times and I finally finished it because I didn't have anything else in the house. It's not that it's terribly bad, it's just that it's so not as good as it could be.

It's hard to explain, first of all the story is narrated by a book. Wicked cool idea no? And yet, I feel like the invention wasn't developed and explored in ways I had hoped. I enjoyed the sections the book "narrated" but I wanted more of them.

The Book, which is Newton's Principia Mathematica is taken by Jennet Stearne after her dear Aunt, who has been her teacher, is hanged as a witch - by her father. Her Aunt implores her to use the PM along with Aristotle's elements to disprove witchcraft once and for all. Immediately following her father is sent to the colonies to do his witchfinding there. He is apprenticing his son and takes his work very seriously. Jennet, who is not convinced, hides her research and she attempts to slowly work out how she will what her aunt wants. The rest of the novel is an exploration of reason against superstition with some religion thrown in to boot. This is the kind of stuff that generally gives me goosebumps.

I can't put my finger on what it is that put me off about the novel. There's a great cast of well developed characters, Jennet is true to form throughout the novel, her adventures - if not a bit fantastic - are fun to read. I want her to succeed even though I don't particularly like her. Maybe the story is just too long and ultimately takes too long to get where I know we are going. Maybe I was just in a mood, but something about this novel didn't click for me.

One Thousand White Women - Jim Fergus

2010-06-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

This is a great Western (two words I didn't ever think I'd write next to each other about something I'd read) that centers on the women who participated in President Grant's fictional Brides for Indians program in order to try and get Native Americans to be more agreeable to reservation life and assimilation. The novel centers on the fictional journal of Mary Dodd, who volunteers for the program in order to escape the asylum she's been committed to by her family for having illegitimate children with a man below her class. the unknown life of the fronteir is better than the life she knows and she only has to commit to the program for two years. The point is to bear mixed race children afterall.

Mary is joined as the first group in the 1000 women exchange by a cast of characters who are mostly even more desperate than Mary. A ruined Southern Belle, two former prostitutes, the religious zealot who goes for the missionary potential, the former slave. Each of the women, and there are more, are vividly portrayed in their own right.

Frontier life too, if vividly portrayed. There is a frankness in the writing that is sometimes unexpected, but always appreciated. As the women, to varying degrees, assimilate into their new Native families the interactions and understandings they develop are poignant but not romaticized. There is ugliness too: drunkeness and rape, no one is idolized over another, but the attempt at understanding that happens between this small group of women and their families speaks volumes towards what could be accomplished. I read this novel the same weekend I went to anti SB1070 where I was disappointed by the lack of white faces in attendance. I couldn't help marveling over the parallels in this book and our current political climate.

Mary Dodd is an engaging narrator. She is sharp and witty and wise beyond her young years. She is pragmatic and honest and eventually transformed. This first group of women is, of course, also the last. The others never follow, instead war comes. The mindless, hateful machine backing up policies intended to exterminate what it can't understand is laid bare far more clearly than in any history class I ever took.

In the Woods Tana French

2010-06-14T17:24:00.000-07:00

I read The Likeness before I read In the Woods and it was a mistake. I hate it when that happens. You read the more recent, better written novel first and then go back. Which isn't to say ITW isn't a great novel, but having just finished the former it made ITW easier to work out and thus a little disappointing.

The story begins with a tale about three kids that wander into the neighborhood woods one afternoon and many hours later one is found clutching a tree, terrified, speechless, with blood pooled in his socks. It's one of those stories that never get solved. The tragedy that looms. From there, the novel centers on Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan, detectives on a fictional police force in Ireland who get called to the scene when a dead body is found in the middle of an archealogical dig, just outside the neighborhood where the kids disappeared 20 years ago. So, we have as a reader, two mysteries to solve.

SPOILER ALERT

Turns out Rob Ryan is the kid clutching the tree in the old mystery. I'm not sure how big a spoiler that is cause most readers had to see it coming. Anyway, Cassie is in on his secret but they don't tell anyone so he won't be taken off the case. You know that's going to cause some trouble.

Cassie and Rob start canvasing the area questioning the neighbors trying to figure out who would have killed a teenage girl and left her displayed in the middle of a dig. There are potential political motives with a new road being constructed destroying the dig site and affecting the surrounding property values, there's the 20 year old mystery that wasn't solved but many of the players are still around - adults now raising their own children, and there's a key investigator who's judgment is skewed.

The way the story unfolds is compelling and the layers of mystery that have to be peeled back are totally satisfying. The only problem was, I new who the killer was upon introduction. I don't know if it's because I had already read The Likeness of it's because it was that obvious, but it took a lot of the steam out of the story for me. To the point where I felt the killer was so obviously written it was at times insulting that the reader was suppose to be surprised. I wonder if it would have been the case if I'd not read her other work. Even knowing who it ultimately is that's done the deed, the unraveling was still a totally enjoyable read.

gun, with occasional music - jonathan lethem

2010-06-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

The jacket cover of this novel compared the author to Carver, 'nough said. I have to say, it did not disappoint. This book is a hell of a lot of fun.

gwom is sci-fi noir in a dystopic future setting where Kangaroos carry guns and work as mob henchman, and sheep are kept as lovers. In the middle we have Metcalf, a PI with a mild drug addiction, not many karma points, and a mystery that's leading him nowhere good. When one of his clients gets accused of murder and then ends up dead it sets the authorities on his path. He's not the type that can walk away to save his own hide, no matter how bad it gets so he investigates even when he knows he doesn't want the answer.

The dialogue is fantastic. Metcalf remains true to character throughout and working through the other characters' response to him is half the fun. The world Lethem creates drips off the page. The (mostly) subtle commentary on where we're headed isn't as off-putting as it could be and the imagination behind some of the ideas is pretty inspired. I really enjoyed this novel and will definitely read more.

The Emporer of the Ocean - Stephen L Carter

2010-06-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

The Emperor of Ocean Park took a little while to grab me, but eventually I got into it.

The story is a mystery, which isn't normally my kind of thing. It starts out slowly with the protagonist, Talcott Garland, with is wife and child getting the news that his father, a once famous, then controversial, and ultimately humiliated former judge has died. The novel spends some time establishing the kind of marriage Talcott has, his love for his son, and the difficulty of having been the child of the once lauded, conservative, African American judge, who was publicly disgraced. Cleary, there is a lot going on. Not only that, Talcott is a law professor and his wife is up for a judge appointment. One can only assume that now that the judge is dead, more about the circumstances that ended in his disgrace will come to light, and they do. However, they are not what you would expect.

One of the things that seemed funny to me is how dense Talcott sometimes seemed in this novel. Clues are dropping all over him about what might be going on and what might be at stake and generally speaking he has to be hit over the head with it before he gets it, but then I remembered he's not a super spy. He is just a guy, a law professor with a struggling marriage and a once famous, now dead father. He isn't suppose to know how to deal with intrigue and drama outside of his little academic nest.

Eventually, the mystery starts to unravel and little is as it seems. Although Talcott's father appears to have died of a heart attack, his sister believes there has been foul play. Talcott asks a few questions trying to appease his sister and suddenly finds himself wading in a much deeper pool than he expected. It starts to drive him a little nuts. He gets a little paranoid and takes unnecessary risks in a way that seemed to me to be totally believable. His ruminations on race and gender issues as he muddles his way through are interesting and not too preachy.

Ultimately, the novel is longer than it needed to be. There are ideas repeated that don't have to be and sometimes the build up takes longer than it needs to on the way to the next clue. Once in a while you want to shake Talcott and say COME ON, but I liked the novel on the whole.

Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand

2010-06-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

I know it's old, but I just got around to it and I'm glad I've never seen the movie. Seabiscuit is a fantastic read. My only complaint is that it slides into moments where it felt like an academic project converted to a novel, but those moments are few and far between and the research ultimately worth it.

Hillenbrand brings her characters to life. Alcoholic jockey, stern silent trainer, flamboyant owner. You root for all of them, everytime. If her version isn't the truth, I would rather not know. The true coup of this novel though, is Seabiscuit. Hillenbrand's protrayal of the horse is so incredible it's hard to explain. I am a person who is loathe to use the word spirit, but the kind of spirit she infuses into this horse and his relationships with the people around him is awe inspiring.

There are moments that I don't want to ruin for anyone who hasn't read it, but racing moments where you actually feel like you know how this horse felt. How he did the things that he did and why. I will be honest, I cried a LOT in the last chapters of this book and then handed it over to my husband to read. Right now.

A Biagmist's Daugher - Alice McDermott

2010-06-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

I cannot describe how much I loved Charming Billy . I love sad books. I love dark books. I love reading any writer who handles the language well so Alice McDermott is a safe bet most of the time.

ABD is about 20 something Elizabeth, who works for a vanity press in NYC. She spends her days filling the heads of would be writers with big dreams of best sellers she never read. It's her job to get them to believe that despite the rejections they've received to date, there is an audience for their work and if they just get it out there - on their own dime of course. She whips em up into a frenzy and then cashes their check. It's a pretty morally bankrupt job, enough so that even her assistant doesn't want to be promoted to it. Add to that Elizabeth's hopeless nights in an empty bed ever since she swore off sex without love over a year ago and you have a woman in need of something.

Enter Tupper Daniels, author extraordinaire. He bring his novel to Elizabeth to get it published. He's so charasmatic she almost reads his book, but in the end settles for a basic skimming just to get the contract signed. The next day he seduces her. Not just sexually, but intellectually as well. His novel is unfinished. It's about a bigamist from his hometown but since he doesn't know what happened to him he doesn't have an ending to the book. Oddly enough, Elizabeth's father spent his life traveling, so much so that she's convinced he was a bigamist, what are the odds?

It turns out the odds don't matter. The rest of the novel plays itself out as Elizabeth re-examines her memories of her father and family experience in an attempt to help Tupper finish his novel. She becomes far more compelling than the whiny, morally bankrupt girl we first meet although no less mercenary and still a tad melodramatic. Tupper for his part is the self-obsessed would be writer you can like even as you hate him. This is McDermott's first novel, I think, and you can see how her style has developed and grown over time. And this novel leaves the same kind of pang, dead center in your chest that Charming Billy does. It's not as pronounced and the recovery is quick but the impact is still there.

Juliet Naked - Nick Hornby

2010-06-14T15:46:00.001-07:00

I love reading about people who love obsessively. There is something about they way obsession fills a page that thrills me. In Juliet Naked, the obsession is music - double bonus.

In this case, the obsession is doubly impressive because the obsessive, Duncan, is a truly intolerably prig without it. He is the worst kind of academic. The kind that knows more than you do and assumes it's a mark of your character how much you care about the subject of his obsession - no matter how obscure. And we've all met this guy right? There's a reason the obsession has to be so obscure, they can't risk any real competition and if too many people know about their topic they're bound to get it. The fact that Duncan seems periodically aware of the ridiculousness of his obsession only made him seem more pathetic, and yet still somehow compelling.

Obsessive Duncan lives with bored Annie. She has shared lodgings and an uneventful life with him for 15 years; the good fifteen years. She's frustrated and tired and feeling like she's missed so much it's probably not worth chasing anything new. So, clearly, they're equally intolerable on their own. Annie is not obsessed, but she tolerates and enables Duncan's obsession, all the while laughing a little behind his back.

The subject of Duncan's obsession is a singer songwriter, Crow, who went to the bathroom 25 years ago while in a club watching another band. Afterwards, he went home and never wrote another note or sang in public again. The mystery of the event has taken him to cult status, (that and the internet) for a couple hundred people who call themselves "Crowologists". Duncan is their leader.

Hornby establishes the obsession with a brief trip to the states where Duncan is visiting all things related to Crow, including the toilet where he apparently had an epiphany that lead him to leave music forever. One afternoon soon after Annie opens Duncan's mail and finds a disc he's overlooked in his busy, academic, pretention. Turns out it's an early recording of Crow's best ever album, Juliet. It's the pared down version, the basics: it's Juliet Naked. Annie listens to it without Duncan (causing an even bigger fight) and for the first time forms her own opinion of Crow's work. It's not a good one. Duncan of course thinks it's fantastic and writes all about it on his Crow website from which he leads the Crowologists. Two days later he agrees to post Annie's review of the album, which is the polar opposite of his. Duncan warns her about the crazy responses she'll get and to be tough skinned. Instead, she gets a thank you note from Crow himself.

The rest of the novel is an entertaining look at the difference between the idols we worship and reality. Crow is, of course, not the kind of man many would look up to. He is laid bare on the page for everyone to see. He is however likable and this reader anyway was rooting for him a little. Annie of course now has the bestest secret ever (even better than the one Duncan confesses about 1/3 of the way through) and her relationship to that secret and Crow himself alter her in more profound ways than Duncan's obsession seems to have altered him.

Ultimately, it all unfolds with less drama and romance than one might expect. Hornby's style strips everything down, where we expect romance we get conversations about safety issues concerning sex after a heart attack. Where we expect bitter battles we get quiet acceptance of the mundane. Although we expected something different, somehow we knew what was coming all along, didn't we?

Winged Creatures - Roy Freirich

2009-09-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

Carla, Anne, Jimmy, and Charlie are all survivors of a shooting spree in a hamburger joint in their little town. Anne and Jimmy are teenagers, who were having lunch with her father when the shooter shot him. Carla is the waitress who hid in the back, near the kitchen, trying to get her cell phone to make an outbound call as she watched the shoot kill her customers. Charlie is a driving teacher who grazed by a bullet survives almost perfectly in tact. Dr. Laraby, ER doctor and son of a now deceased medical legend had just left the store on his way to the emergency room as is attending when the victims are brought in minutes later. None of them survive.

The novel unfolds in sections named by character. Each person's life just before and in the week or so after the shooting is explored intermittantly with italicized descriptions of their experience of the shooting. The reader never gets the full picture of why each person was there and what they saw until the end of the novel. That's because the novel is about what it does to them. How do these completely disparate people react in the face of this tragedy and what about their lives to then led them to those reactions?

At first all we know is Anne found God; Jimmy went mute; Charlie ran; and Carla, at first, seems to be holding it together. What slowly unfolds is far more complicated. The teenagers have a secret and Anne deals with it by preaching the good word. Jimmy, afraid to speak lest he tells, refuses to speak at all. Charlie, feeling lucky, runs to Vegas capitalize on that luck and finally make a difference for his young family. Carla slowly loses her hold on her life and her small child, and finally, Dr. Laraby risks everything trying to atone for his failures in the operating room.

The pace of the novel is great. It moves you along, if not pulling you sometimes. The exploration of the psychological toll on each of these characters is equally riveting. How does one deal with jealousy in the aftermath of tragic events? How horrible is it to realize there is some possible gain to be had from having been there? These questions are dealt with contextually - not just as the result of one event. For instance, when the unpopular girl at school is suddenly a celebratory because her father didn't survive the shooting but she did, what does that do to a teenager? How is she suppose to process that? How is her mother?

Freirich does amazing work with each of the survivors and their post trauma pathos. He wonderfully manages to not tie up every loose end, which is entirely satisfying in this case.

The Story Sisters - Alice Hoffman

2009-09-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

There is something insidious at the heart of all faerie tales. That's part of their appeal. In The Story Sisters Hoffman gives us three beautiful daughters living with their single mother in Long Island. The eldest Daughter Elv, has invented, for her two younger sisters, a magical world so intense that they speak their own language. They long for this world over the one in which they live daily. In their faerie tale, buried in the woods in a secret land is where all the good in the world exists. Except that, their real life ain't so bad either. The girls grandparents live pretty well in Manhattan, and they reap the benefits of wealthy benefactors. Not only that, grandma also keeps a place in Paris where the girls go each Spring. Their lives are filled with the kind of parties and events of princesses. In addition, as I mentioned, the girls are each extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished. Both worlds would seem to be a fairy tale. Except...

Semi, not-really spoiler

The underside of the fairy tale is hinted at in the opening of the story, and it's not good. The youngest sister is almost snatched on afternoon walking home from school, her older sister intervenes only to be snatched herself. The details aren't necessarily spelled out, but your imagination will fill in those gaps pretty easily. The middle sister, having been no where nearby when the events took place, has no idea. Claudine, the youngest, stays on the spot where Elv was snatched until miraculously she returns and they rush home together. Elv and Claudine keep there horrible secret for the entirety of the novel, never even speaking of it among themselves.

As adolescence kicks in, Elv becomes more and more rebellious: wearing black, keeping all hours, and having sex. Her mother loses total control over her monster of a teenager, who wreaks irreparable damage on the family, and extreme measures are eventually taken. Elv is locked away in an institution. At the institution, she meets a prince, who is anything but. They spiral together to rock bottom. Meanwhile, Elv's remaining family members do what the can to recover from the events that lead to Elv's incarceration. The family is broken and although there is a suggestion at the end that they are finding their way back there is along road to go.

Hoffman is brilliant, as always, in moments. Tying details about the girls' young life to tales from their faerie world informed - you eventually learn - by Elv's experience during the day she was lost to them. Those details become almost excruciating. The problem is, ultimately, the novel, intentionally or not, is such a heart wrenching illustration of how children get lost and more importantly how grown ups fail them that all the beautiful language can't save it from the ick. Faerie tales have always been about teaching a lesson, told by grown ups, to help children to understand things. This novel is a faerie tale in reverse, except none of the grown ups were listening and that failure eradicates much of the beauty of the novel for this reader.

Halting State - Charles Stross

2009-08-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

It's a got a groovy beat and I can totally dance to it, I'd give it a 92

It's got a groove, but it kinda slides into noise towards the end, I'd give it an 83

This is how I imagine myself rating this book to a Dick Clark who's younger than he was at my birth on a show I've only seen in reruns

This is my first Stross novel, and it's good. And, there is a lot going on. It's set in the future for starters, a really convincingly constructed future if I do say so myself. And it revolves around virtual reality games. I haven't played a video game since Atari, and other than a very hung over Saturday in 2002 when I laid on the couch and watched two friends play Grand Theft Auto for 5 hours waiting for the pain to go away I haven't seen one either (I don't get out of my box much). I can imagine if I knew more about the games in general the novel would have been even more impressive. Stross is amazingly convincing in his depiction of both the game and the future.

Stross gets a lot done with his setting alone. There is all kind of social and political commentary on our present just under the surface of his seemingly innocent references to the places in the story. The characters, at first, had me worried: pushy, loud, CEO; mousy, with potential, forensic accountant; schlubish super programmer guy; tough as nails police chick. However, Stross manages to give each one of those cut outs enough to make them human and compelling and impressively surprising in moments. There is on relationship that you know is coming but it emerges at a pace that seems suddenly rushed three quarters of the way, as if a nearing plot point required the relationship more than the characters.

I hate books that wrap up with neat little endings as a rule. And this one wraps up, but it's not necessarily neat and the information withheld until the final 20 pages doesn't drop out of nowhere, another thing I hate.

Overall I'm leaning more with side one of my brain as I finish this review, maybe it's not noise so much as just a single instrument out of key.

End of the World Blues - Jon Courtnay Grimwood

2009-08-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is a fun read.

It's a whodunit disguised as a sci-fi. And, I hafta say, the sci-fi element is key. Not that it isn't a good whodunit, but the sci-fi part is just a good trippy distraction in the places where my brain would have gotten tired of trying to follow all the little leads. That might be my problem with whodunits, I bore of the procedure quickly - but not so much when someone is traversing time.

The main character is Kit, who starts out not entirely likeable and ends the same way, even though his character evolves through the novel. I respect that about this book. Kit isn't redeemed entirely, nor is he let off the hook. He is true to character and makes some better decisions later in the book than he did early. Totally respectable in that department. The fact that those decisions tie everything about the whodunit off so neatly a little less so.

Enter:

Nijie, a street urchin in Tokyo is the other significant character and the source of all things supernatural in the book. She takes on the identity of Lady Neku as a cos-play character and manages to save Kit's life twice in the opening 50 pages of the book. Her loose ends, not so tied off. She's from the distant future - a not very bright one - and she and Kit are tied together though an object. I've read that her future is existence is too underdeveloped in places and it is ambiguous, but by the time you get to the end it works. She's a kid. What we see of her future world reflects her childish understanding of it, her memory of it and her trauma in it. It sounds exactly a lot like what my nephew sounds like trying to describe something weird that you've never seen. It totally worked for me.

Exit Ghost - Philip Roth

2009-08-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I read a book and regardless of whether it's any good or not, or I liked it or not, there is an image that stays with me. Sometimes for months. When the narrator describes his young son playing the in the sprinklers in Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, the tooth pulling scene delivered so matter-of-factly in Listening for Small Sounds, and Temple Drake's skin inching up her frame in Sanctuary come to mind. And for me, in this novel, I'm just going to want Jamie to have never spoken at all. If only. There is something about her voice that is so jarringly false - to the point of distraction - that for this reader it went a long way towards ruining a perfectly enjoyable read.

Exit Ghost is Nathan Zuckerman's swan song of sorts. A virtual recluse for the last 10 years, he returns to New York city to have a procedure done that is meant to control his post-prostate cancer incontinence - it's a return likened to Rip Van Winkle (I kid you not - this is Roth right?) In the city, Nathan, on a whim, answers an ad for a house trade for a year. Two young authors, one of whom is rattled in post 9/11 New York city, are looking to escape for a year. Nathan, feeling invigorated and hopeful answers the ad and meets the two young authors. Ridiculous, puppy-dog loyal David, and his ever-so-lovely, 30 year-old, more talented (although one publication 5 years prior is the only evidence of this) wife, Jamie.

Nathan becomes involved - more so imaginatively than really - with this couple, the "friend" of theirs who hopes to write a biography on a now-deceased friend of his, and a couple of one-time friends in the city. An author himself, Nathan imaginatively reconstructs many of his exchanges in NY in an effort to work on (most probably) his final novel. As the novel progresses, we learn that Nathan's facilities, mental as well as physical, are less and less reliable. With the introduction of the young seductress, Jamie, Nathan laments the loss of his youth anew.

There are moments where the story fires on all cylinders. There is a secret, a new look at the past, a possible untapped potential - elements that propel the story convincingly. Nathan is sympathetic and compelling. His interactions, while occasionally somewhat polemic, are nonetheless entertaining. At moments the dialogue is so good you feel like you're in the middle of the conversation. This is especially true with Nathan and Amy, or Nathan and Kliman. But then there is Jamie.

I don't know if the author fell in love with the character himself or what, but nothing about her rang true for this reader after the first introduction. She is so idealized that even the moments that are suppose to flush her out as a "regular" girl on some level fail miserably. By the middle of the novel, it felt as though there was a cardboard poster with "insert perfect fantasy woman here" filling the space from which we should have been able to hear Jamie's voice. It's reasonable that Zuckerman fell so in love with her, was blinded by need, want, desperation etc. and in his memory of her we understand that. However, in the real time exchanges, his POV can't account for "That's how we got so devoted so quickly - they provided us with delightful tales of horror and mirth" or "I told you: he is adventurous. He's drawn to daring ventures. What's wrong with that?" All I can think is, who talks like this. Really. Or rather, what tolerable person talks like this, let alone one who would inspire the cloying adoration of a husband, an ex and an old man who figured himself well past the point of being interested in much of anything at all?

Ultimately, the story kind of peters out at the end. I felt like there was more build up than delivery, but at the same time I did really enjoy parts of the novel. That must be what the problem is for me, I so enjoyed the parts I enjoyed that it made all of the Jamie business so damned disappointing. I actually groaned aloud driving home from the mountains when a particularly infuriating Jamie scene followed a phenomenally strong one with Amy. I wanted to punch her out, just so she'd shut the fuck up.

A Spot of Bother/mark Haddon

2009-07-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

I dare say I can't even begin to say anything about this book without first saying: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a tequila book. You know how when you say the word tequila, at least half your listeners will go "awww" caught momentarily in some horrific tequila memory? It's almost universal. This book elicits a similar response with the exception that the memory is no NO WAY horrific. It's just that good.

So, for a girl who prides herself on her expectation management skills, having just finished some stellar Garland, I truly feel like I am tempting the fates. So, I really hunkered down and told myself as long this book did anything short of sucking I would be happy.

For anyone whose ever felt darkness coming (and who hasn't?) this is your novel.

A Spot of Bother is a novel about George, his wife Jean, their son Jamie, daughter Katie, and the necessary peripheral people that come with each. Jean is having an affair, Jamie is a (gasp) homosexual, Katie is about to marry a man she doesn't love, and George is slowly, relatively gracefully going insane. Which among them is craziest is totally a matter of opinion.

The novel covers about an eight week period after George first discovers his "cancer" at a suit fitting for the funeral of a friend. George, of course, keeps his cancer (and his crazy) secret, which really isn't that difficult when you are surrounded by some of the most self-absorbed people on the planet. To the point where I am a little surprised I was not more wholly annoyed with all of them, George included.

It's the humor that saves it. Haddon's story is damn funny. The perspective changes seamlessly between each of the family members. Often times specific events are narrated from Jean's perspective, only to be completely repeated from Katie's or George's in the very next pages. Initially, it highlights the total self-absorption of the characters, but as the novel progresses it demonstrates the evolutions of the various characters and at the same time illustrates how easy it is to miss the point - for all of us.

As the book progresses, each of the characters has to come out of themselves, to varying degrees. Jamie is probably the funniest and most methodical about it. After a anti-climatic break up and the requisite self-serving wallowing, Jamie decides he wants to fix it. He does so mostly because he realizes he's in danger of becoming one of those people "who cares about furniture more than other people" which would mean he would spend all of his time with others like him, which means they would care more about the furniture than they care about him. You see how this is going. The interior conversations Jamie has with himself about how to go about caring about other people and what it means to him on his way to actually caring about other people is priceless.

So, it's a really funny sad book. All of the "comic caper" reviews had me expecting something a little lighter to be honest. There is real sadness in this book. Sadness about what real life is really like and what it eventually becomes, expectation, fear. It is definitely funny when a grown man of a certain position in life finds himself lying in a ditch to avoid relatives on the street, except that it's really not. Part of the gift of this writer is that he can make us laugh about it, but at it's core it's a comedy about a whole lot of things most of us don't find very funny.

I would call this novel a success. It's not as tight as the previous, but c'mon. There are moments where the characters (Jean especially, I think) become grating to the point where you just don't want to hear it anymore, or you want to slap them upside their heads; however, as soon as you loose patience Haddon somehow turns it around by making you laugh or making you realize you're like that too.

I'm relieved. It's far better than I dared hoped.

Remainder - Tom McCarthy.

2009-07-21T21:02:00.001-07:00

The premise of this book is that a unnamed, 30 year-old narrator was the victim of an accident where an unnamed "thing" fell from the sky injuring him badly. When he awakes from his coma, his life is irrevocably changed for many reasons. The two major ones being that "[he has] to understand things before I can do them" and his "settlement." That first one, although it seems somewhat innocuous on the surface, well let me not get ahead of myself.

The book opens with a first person account of our narrator getting news of the settlement that's been dangled in front of him throughout his PT. As he re-learned to walk, feed himself, dress etc nurses and doctors constantly referred to his settlement and all the comfort it would buy him. Then he receives 8 1/2 million pounds. THEN, he invests it in a fund that replaces it almost as fast as he can spend it, and spend it he does.

Our narrator now has 8 1/2 million pounds to finance his crazy. Think about that for a minute. Having the money to finance whatever brand of crazy you have. Right?

Our narrator has a moment of deja vu after receiving his settlement and remembers a place where he felt whole - or mostly remembers it. The first thing he sets about doing is recreating that place. Not just the apartment in which he lived though, he wants the same views, the same neighbors, the same smells, the same conversations etc. He hires Naz, a project planner of sorts, to help bring his vision to fruition. It starts out a plan to help a displaced man feel at home again, excessive but understandable. But the problem is, if you feed crazy it will grow.

The crazy spreads, oozing into other parts of his life. He ventures out of his new domicile rarely, but when he does so he ends up wanting to recreate every experience he has. Actors must be hired, locations found and reconstructed to match the places where the original occurrence happened. The re-enactments then take place round the clock so that the narrator can come and watch or participate at any time. Eventually, there are re-enactments of events that didn't happen to the narrator but interest him, and eventually the re-enactments kind of sort of take over the real, as you can imagine well-financed crazy would.

It's a good read. For the most part it speeds along except for when it intentionally comes to a crawl. The first person narration is more effective than I originally thought it might be, but as the story progresses maintaining the unnamed narrators perspective is key to accepting the events that take place in the final act of the novel. The only complaint I have about the book is that there are times where the descent into the narrator's thought process that is so key to his crazy goes on for too long. It isn't funny or scary, it flirts with boring, like the person you get stuck next to a party that wants to give you all the finer details of having planted a tree in their front yard this morning.

Ultimately, for me, what worked so well in this novel was the opening conceit: having to understand before you can do. The novel illustrates the things the narrator can eventually understand and do and those he can't and the things he thinks he does and doesn't and things he does but doesn't realize it. You get the picture.

Tesseract/Alex Garland

2009-07-20T10:47:00.001-07:00

First, I love, love, loved The Beach, not the DiCaprio abomination put on large screens all across the land, but the novel in all it's "game over," weed smoking, traveling beauty. There I said it. I should have stared with: First, I wanted to hate the beach, because I did, but I didn't and so you have the first that I wrote first. Then, I read Coma. I was not as immediately stuck by that novella; it crept up on me slowly. It took me almost a week to love it. Enter The Tesseract. I know better than to expect much. Two novels I love by the same author in order with no offending trite bullshit (I'm looking at you Oates) in between? I sat it on it for months. Pulled it out and moved it around on my desk every few days. Read and reread the glowing reviews and thought, yeah, well you can't very well turn on the author of the fist great novel of Generation X now can you? (No shit, reviewers said that about TB) Then, I had to take a trip for work, one that I knew would be unfathomably noxious, so I threw it in the bag. I guess I just outed myself as still hopeful, but I promise my expectation management (something at which I EXCEL) was in full force.

I was almost all the way through page six and almost wholly apathetic, but then the novel took off. "Everything weird was the bottom line, and Sean had reached it quickly." Really? How does it take that little for the hair on the back of my neck to come to full attention and for me to be unabashedly ecstatic for what's to come? I mean really, what kind of whore am I? A sated one I am happy to tell you.

The Tesseract is a story in three parts. the primary action covers about a sixty minute window on the streets of Manila where a British seaman and a Filipino gangster are set to hash out protection payment issues. The culmination of this meeting brings together the characters from the other two segments of the story, but not before the narrative dissolves into back stories for both. It has no doubt been compared to Pulp Fiction in it's delivery. The novel does a stellar job of weaving the current moment for the three different stories with the necessary back stories as well as keeping them thinly related to one another real time. That means nothing feels cheap, no coincidence that makes your teeth itch, not little tid bit kept from the reader past the second where they should know. It's straight up, honest story telling.

The same voice narrates each of the three stories and so there is a consistency of tone regardless of the age, sex, background of the character. More importantly this allows for each character to be drawn not just from the perspective of the narrator and what the narrator knows, but from what the narrator can report about those around the central characters and their interactions. This is, for this reader, a huge part of the success of the novel. The development of each character in starts and stops from a myriad of viewpoints results in living breathing people on the page. Once you accomplish that, the rest is just easier. If characters are compelling, believable, relatable creations then everything they do becomes interesting even if it isn't. And, of course, everything that happens here is interesting.

Each of the "main" characters spends a fair amount of time in their own head, and I can appreciate the Coma-esque moments that Sean in particular experiences in his panic. The interior monologue gives the reader a glimpse into the how and why easily avoidable events aren't. It also heightens the thrill of the novel even though it makes some of the events even more predictable.

The best part of the novel though, are in these little, almost lost moments where the truly peripheral characters shine. One of the "main" characters is Rosa, an accomplished physician in Manila. Her father is deaf due to an accident. Amid the chaos that is the crescendo of her back story they share an exchange that is both heart wrenching and grounding. She has a similar experience thirty years later in a park with an unnamed stranger. These moments exist for each of the "main" characters, making their lives seem more ordinary, but at the same time more valuable.

He's done it again.

Last Dragon/JM McDermott

2009-07-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

Man I dig this book. I mean really, really dig.

It's confusing as all hell. I'll say that right up front. You're actually expected to read!?!?! There are no "markers" for the narrative. You know what means? None of those annoying conversations between characters to sum up the action thus far, no dates or times at the beginning of chapters, no establishing of age or location overtly. Halle - fucking- lujah. I'll trade three parts confusion for no parts being led by the nose any day of the goddamn week. Make that every day...

The whole novel gets delivered in short (3 page max) vignettes told (mostly) from the voice of Zahn, now an old woman, assumed to by dying. She is retelling her experience as a young warrior charged with hunting down her own grandfather and killing him. Of course nothing is ever that easy and a task that like that can't be accomplished alone.

One of the things that impressed me about this novel is that the narrative effectively mirrors (what I can believe are) the near death ramblings of a once great warrior. The non-linear, hazy feel of the novel reinforces this initial conceit from beginning to end. On top of that, the narrative is well-paced and some of the descriptions are fantastically compelling, to the point where you start to realize the parts most important to the now dying Zahn are far more colorful than those warrior Zahn might have highlighted then, which is a sign of pretty rich writing in my humble. It's not all perfect. There are some language issues that are distracting scattered throughout the novel. The vocabulary available to second language speakers in short order is often times unrealistic, especially when considered next to the language struggles described on other occasions. Also, the terms aren't always consistent or convincing, but these are small complaints.

I don't read a lot of fantasy, which is to say almost none. I've read other places that this novel breaks form with a lot of fantasy writing and has not been especially well received. Not knowing much about the genre it's hard for me to comment, but I will say for a reader with zero in terms of expectation I really enjoyed this book. The characters for the most part "pop" and remain true to form throughout the novel. Even the unlikable are compelling and the maze of secrets that underlie much of the story are reasonable and well-delivered.

I don't know, this doesn't make it sound all that likable really, does it? And yet, I really like it. There's something about it. Clearly, I can't put my finger on it, but it was wholly worth the read.

Ice Queen/Alice Hoffman

2009-07-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know why this novel brought Wally Lamb to mind, but it did. The prose are not lush like Lamb's and the story is not as dramatically delivered as Lamb tends to be - this is Hoffman after all. It might be something about the descriptions. In this novel, Hoffman gives the reader a glimpse into the internal life of the characters you rarely see and would never expect. Lamb, I think, does that as well, differently though.

Initially, the conceit of this novel seemed a little too easy to me and having just finished Alvarez the spareness was somewhat jarring, but within twenty or so pages Hoffman had me. Our Ice Queen is a single New Jersey librarian who made a wish when she was a child that ended her life as she knew it ad rendered her emotionally frozen and obsessed with death. Many years later, she is stuck by lightening and the great thaw begins.... See, you're rolling your eyes just a little aren't you? But it's a faerie tale people, and a good one.

I read some reviews that focus on the rebirth of Ice Queen. Her slow thaw to the world around her and what she's allowed herself to miss in her frozen state definitely drive the narrative. The thaw being the catalyst for all the action of the novel. The Ice Queen agrees to participate in a study with other survivors of lightening strikes, ultimately searching out the reclusive Lazarus, whose strike basically set him on fire, permanently. She's frozen, he is boiling, the middle ground is pretty obvious. In the meantime, there is a parallel story line between our narrator and her older brother, who shared in the tragic events set in motion by the young narrator's wish, and their relative estrangement. The study she joins is part of his work; therefore, drawing them closer while at the same time highlighting their distance. And so the narrator evolves into someone else, she sheds her cocoon and ...

but I was more struck by other elements. Hoffman's imagining of a faerie tale and the primal fears that drive such tales evolves into exploration of sorts for the source of that primal fear. The Ice Queen's strike might have sparked some heat into her frozen veins but it also gave her a quantifiable, comparable sort of damage. One that, I would argue, gave her a space from which to see others'. On some level, don't our fears generate as a direct result of our individual damage, or rather how we qualify that damage? It doesn't require the same event between two people for their fears to mirror one another, just a similar processing of their damage...or does it? I can't say I know for sure, but it is the thing at which this novel seems to be driving at - straight through your heart.

Saving the World - Julia Alvarez

2009-07-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

When is the last time you read a novel where at the end the great flaw in the love story wasn't laid bare to the reader? The dead spouse's lover doesn't come forward, the step-mother isn't hiding some awful secret in her past, no ghost of dead child lurking just a few pages ahead? I'm almost programmed to be guessing which of the myriad of possibilities it will be as soon as any character is established as truly in love with anyone. Julia Alvarez provides two such stories in one little novel. Go figure.

Saving the World is, on the surface, the story of Alma Huebner, happily-married one time author. She has a wonderful little life in Vermont that she came to lateish (39 gasp) with a husband who may be fussy but who loves her, good friends nearby, and an ailing surrogate mother across the yard. Her only problem is that her teeth have started to itch. She's struggling to finish a novel for which she's already taken the advance, she is too easily irritated with her loving husband and is becoming judgmental of her friends. Pretty standard every day stuff. That's the thing, Julia Alvarez, in the first half of this novel, does a stand up job of demonstrating how the everyday can be desperate, compelling, overwhelming, even when we know it isn't - when it's someone else's everyday.

The parallel story to Alma's is the book she's actually writing. It's not a book she had any intention to write, it just started. It's the imagining of the life a barely mentioned woman in the historical accounts of a Spanish expedition in the early 1800s. The kind of thing that's gotten popular lately. Alma, as her life gets to be too much for her, finds solace in her imagined Isabel (which might be one of the most romantic Spanish names in my humble). Isabel has a love story of her own. Again, it is far from perfect, never for a second idealized by the author (although often times by the character), and again there is no stunning twist. So we have these two women juxtaposed beautifully, most effectively in the moments where Alma seems the fictional imagining of someone who tells story for a living and Isabel flesh blood.

I don't generally love the two stories in one format. I generally find myself interest in only one of the two and skimming the other. Not this time. I was not equally interested, but my interest in both stories waxed and waned so that I stayed involved in both. That may be an incredible gift of pacing and it may be a result of my attention span, I'm not sure which. Neither story is happy, but they are woven together in a way that is totally satisfying and I'm prone to sad so your mileage may vary.

Our Lady of the Forest - Guterson

2009-07-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Our Anne. She's a pill popping runaway who picks mushrooms to get by because it's better than sharing a bed with her mother's meth addicted boyfriend at his leisure. Her desperation, is however, effectively downplayed in the novel. The matter of factness of her experience is laid bare in a way that isn't exactly shocking but makes it all acceptable. She shares the camp where she squats outside Seattle with Carolyn, the college educated, self-loathing, skeptic who takes full advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. Our Anne's priest is a struggling 30ish man who is exceptional only for his vow of celibacy and how that puts sex front and center in his life. His struggles are far less exalted than current events may lead one to expect - racy novels and impure thoughts being the worsr of his crimes.

The impact of the novel comes from the speed and thrall of events after the first of three promised apparitions by the Virgin Mother herself to Our Anne, as she comes to be known. I was a kid when Mary appeared to (was it six?) kids in Medjugoria. I remember them on 60 Minutes. I had friends who went to visit and came home with golden rosary beads. For reals. The hysteria around events like these vary, I'm sure, and that's the crux of this novel.

Guterson, without getting to preachy for my tastes, gives the reader insight into the effects of these "miracles" on a small fringe community and town on whose edge they live. Pilgrims begin arriving within 24 hours of the first vision and then the miracles begin, large and small: a woman is cured of warts, a lost sheep finds his path, a church that couldn't get financied gets built in under a year, a priest reasserts his faith and focus. And what of the apparitions? Real or imaginary? Does it matter? More importantly, has anyone really changed? Did we expect that they would? Do we need them to? The novel is as much about examining those questions as it is about telling a story, which is does well. As with all stories that deal with these kinds of issues (in my experience), it ends a little too easily, too neat, but it's compelling. Guterson gets less lost in the landscape then he did in my last read of him, for which I am grateful.

I have to confess, I am somewhat drawn to all thingsreligious and ghosty - that might have effected my read.

Seeker/Jack McDevitt

2009-05-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

The semester is coming to an end and I mean to make up for much lost time in the Cannonball Read. To that end, I made a stop at the library on Sunday and came home with four novels I know not one thing about. Except, I've finished Seeker so I guess I know something about it now.

Many of the reviews of this book say something like: McDevitt creates a world that structurally or texturally much like ours only on epic/interstellar/universal (I'm not sure which is the right word - they all seem pretty vanilla to me) proportions. I don't disagree, but ultimately, I think that might be what disappointed me a little. I honestly got a little bored by then end. The lead characters starting seeming far too much like people I know and who sometimes annoy me. Thirteen thousand years into the future not much has changed.

However, I read this book in just under 48 hours and I have a full time job and teach so that's something of a compliment. Clearly, it drew me in. I have to want to get through a book to get through one that fast these days. Seeker is part mystery, part crime novel, part social commentary. The mystery part is strong enough in the opening chapters to have grabbed me. I should say I'm not much of a mystery reader so in this respect I may be an easy lay. The story then evolves around a pair of "tomb raiders" who aren't completely without appreciation for the treasure they seek, even if they do it mainly in the name of profit. They are some 13000 yearsish in the future seeking archaeological artifacts across a variety of universes to which the human race has spread. Some of these artifacts are as simple as t-shirts and tea cups some less. They also, a la antique roadshow, value people's stuff for them from time to time. This is where our story takes off.

An artifact that sounds an awful lot like a coffee mug finds it 's way into their office via a tacky, low-rent, abused ex-girlfriend of a thief. Turns out said cup might be much more. At this point the reader can go ahead and read in as many holy grail comparisons as they like, or not. Holy grail or not, the race is on. There is a fair amount of rushing around getting the heavy detective stuff concluded in order to propel the story, with a few twists, that you would be hard pressed not to see coming. I don't mean to suggest that it wasn't enjoyable, but having finished I still feel like I just got the broad strokes of a much more nuanced story.

Ultimately, there are two larger theoretical debates taking place in the novel. First, who owns what and what does it mean? Should history belong to everyone equally, has it ever? Does it make a difference? And, what ultimately most influences human evolution? Ambitious questions. I realized about 50 pages short of the finish that there was going to be no way for this novel to end satisfactorily for me. I'm sure it does for many, but I was left feeling kinda...what's the word?

Bad Monkeys/Matt Ruff

2009-04-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

This is not my usual fair; I will own that going in. I read this on recommendation of someone close to me. I've never read any other Ruff, but I'm told this is somewhat unlike his other offerings.

From the very first page, I was hooked. The novel opens with stage like descriptions of the "scene." "White walls. White ceiling. White floor. Not featureless, but close enough to raise suspicion that its few contents are all crucial to the upcoming drama." As much as I hate to be told how to feel, in this case, I am amused. Laying out the characters in their space, Ruff creates a feeling of claustrophobia. However, no matter how claustrophobic it's still a blank canvas and you have to wonder: who gets to do the painting?

Jane Charlotte it would appear, but then maybe not. I immediately like Jane. She's sassy. She's in the Clark County Detention Center "the nut wing" for killing someone she wasn't suppose to kill. Right away you know she's delusional enough to believe there are people she is suppose to kill. She believes she works for a secret "organization" that fights evil, not crime mind you, evil. So the stage is set with a pithy, supercool protagonist in a novel where all the apparatus are intentionally, and mostly effectively, put on display. Unraveling the mystery of who is delusional or not and why then becomes the action of the novel.

The novel itself is a fast read, so fast that the reader find themselves feeling like they missed something. Sometimes I did, only to realize it was intentional withholding, revealed a few pages later. The work play is probably what kept me reading this novel. As the reader gets further and further into the mind of Jane, it becomes evident how much truth in any situation relies on the language available to express sit. The simple meanings, with all good postmodernist know are never simple, of every day works convolute and confuse not just the telling of the story but the action itself.

At the root of the story, is, of course, who or what is evil and who gets to decide. Those lines are at times effectively blurred, and at times so ineffectively that you find yourself not so much caring one way or another.

Finally, for this reader, although I was compelled to follow Jane down the rabbit hole, the ending was too pat. At the end of novel that bends all kinds of rules, I expected much bigger things. But then ultimately that might have been the point. No matter how crazy the maze or how deftly the language is rendered, the final verdict since the days of bad guys in black and heroes with white hats always, by definition feels somewhat mundane.

immortality/Milan Kundera

2009-04-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

I somehow completed a graduate degree in the Literatures and didn't read any Kundera. I'm not honestly sure if any was assigned, or if it was assigned in the those first few semesters where I might have let the occasional requirement slide by unscathed. I picked up immortality because it seemed like I should, not because I expected to love it - but then I did.

If the book were to have a center, and I'm not sure that it does, it would lie in a gesture. A simple, almost unnoticeable gestures any one of us makes on any given day. That gesture is planted in the mind of our narrator, Kundera himself. And from there the reader embarks with the narrator through a series of events and sometimes non-events that track the creative process, as he spins the web of tails around Agnes, her sister and her husband.

Entire characters are invented and developed from the slightest movement another. The all seeing eye of the narrator vacillates seamlessly between the fiction he creates and the one in which he lives. To call the novel pomo, as I'm sure has been done, is selling it short. Honestly, I almost wonder if this novel wouldn't be the most effective reading students in intro fiction labs could read.

the bright forever

2009-01-11T19:14:00.000-08:00

The opening chapter of this book ends: "I warn you: this is a story as hard to hear as it is for me to tell" and that's the truth. The "me" telling the story changes by chapter, but by the time you're four or five deep (they're only 3 or 4 pages each) you know whose speaking without the benefit of markers. Certain dates get narrated by an omniscient narrator, who sounds most like Mr. Dees, who is the first narrator the reader meets and arguably the "main" character. Although that might ultimately be a matter of timing, every character is convincingly flushed out spread eagle in their few pages throughout the novel.

The central event of the novel is the disappearance of a young girl, who is dramatically, universally beloved by everyone - even those who don't know it yet - in her fictional Indiana town. The novel slowly unfolds, unraveling the mystery of what happened to the little girl and at the hands of whom. A third of the way in, the action takes a back seat to the character development. The slow unfolding of the pathos just under the surface of every character: rich, poor, happy, sad, male, female, young and old.

In the end, it is our secrets that both hold us together and send us into spontaneous combustion - a slow building, eventual spontaneous combustion. It's not a new idea, but it's successfully executed until the final thirty pages. Maybe it's because I read it all in one sitting and the sad might have gotten to be too much or the drama to intense, but it just kind of lost me. The dignity of the characters began to seep away, they moved from unsympathetic, real people to something else.

Maybe it's the central event - the disappearance and misuse of a child is not something most people can gloss over at the end and no matter how convincingly culpability gets spread among "everyman" in the novel. And maybe it's the direct, calculated way that point is made in the final pages. However, at the end of the day, some of us are more culpable than others and some acts of cowardice, or even non-acts, are just as violent as the ones executed by those who are armed. More importantly, they might be harder to forgive.

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

2009-01-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

It might just be the place I'm in these days, or the season with all of the holiday bullshit, or my predisposition to depression, but this book did not make me laugh.ever.once.

That is not to say I didn't love it. I have to be honest, I've not read any Hornby since High Fidelity. Somehow he fell off my radar, and if it weren't for a delayed flight in Chicago a week ago he might not have found his back on, but low and behold there in the window right across from the gate that would own my ass for the next 5 hours, Hornby.

A Long Way Down is a book about 4 almost suicides that probably never really would have been and one definite suicide that we know virtually nothing about. Again, taking my above mentioned predispositions to heart, I have to say this book rang about as sadly, pathetically, and shockingly true as anything else I've ever read on the subject. There is no romance here. I don't just mean that Hornby takes all the mystery and romance out of the act itself, but he robs the survival of any melodramatic, hopeful romance too. There are no kittens running through the fields while resurrected families picnic in the foreground when this book is over - but I like Hornby's final image far better than I would have liked that.

Every single one of the characters in this book is fucked in the way that people you know are fucked, or that you are yourself. That's not to say they don't have issues with which you may not have dealt, but you could paste a host of your own over theirs and get the same psychological result - and that's what's scary. At one point, a lying, cheating, suck of a husband wrecks his own car because it's "easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps and the hurt and the rage and the loathing...who wouldn't go that extra yard to avoid it." And who reads that and can't think of all the little things they do in the course of the day that are the equivalent of this guy's car wreck? We all do it. Some just do it larger than others. The book is full of scenes you've lived between people you know. It vacillates between fatalistic, hopeful, pathetic, and eventually just being. I did not laugh once, and I will be honest, I cried more than once. It wasn't a sad cry though, or not wholly. It was the kind of cry you have when even knowing something really bad is okay if you aren't the only one.

There are moments of community among the mismatched foursome that didn't. They bond speciously over music, the beach, swearing. The brevity of these exchanges says more about humans and community and want than any number of psychological tomes out there. It works because Hornby gives us these truths and these experiences of these people and flat out refuses to let us feel sorry for them - ever. You relate because you can't stand to feel sorry for them anymore than you can stand the self pity you briefly allow yourself driving home alone at the end of the day. It's just too...ick, And they would punch you in the throat, everyone single one of them, if you offered them your sympathy anyway. So they all escape caricature, and we respect them even if we don't like them; We want them to be okay even though we know they did it to themselves.

The characters' message over and over again in the book is that people who are sad don't fit in. As a culture, we don't know what to do with them, and yet, it demonstrates clearly that we're all sad most of the time - some of us climb to the top of Topper Tower and some of us don't -- but it's clear in A Long Way Down that the climbing or not may be the only difference among us.

#3 Lives of Girls and Women

2008-12-15T20:26:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, for my money, Alice Munro is pretty bankable. From her regular stories in The New Yorker to The Beggar Maid I never finish Munro without having taken something from it. I'm late getting to LOGAW according to its 2001 publication date; she occasionally falls off my radar. I like her, but she's not a head straight for her place on the shelf in the bookstore writer for me.

That said, I really enjoyed Lives, some of this, I'm certain is because it appeals to many of my own personal sensitivities. And, this probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but there is something a little Angela Walkerish in Munro's Del. Although, undeniably Del's issues are far more fraught and the consequences more immediate. You know as much on page one, the stand alone line "He was not our uncle, or anybody's" tells as much with the chills it sends down your spine. And, the line is well-played because the rest of the book is never quite as traumatic nor tragic as that for which that line sets you up, which oddly enough allows the myriad of struggles Del negotiate through the rest of the novel something of a relief.

The novel follows the pitfalls and struggles of Del working her way through adolescence, feeling like she doesn't fit in and no one gets her. She feels like a certain kind of girl, in a certain time and place, but maybe what works about it is that ultimately, it's about being a girl. Whether you are or were a girl like Del or not you recognize the struggle, the doubt, the want. "I felt that is was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed that being female made you damageable.." Isn't the place from which we all start?

# 2 Where you Once Belonged Kent Haruf

2008-12-15T09:10:00.001-08:00

With a title like Where you Once Belonged you can't go in expecting much in the way of happy, which isn't all that surprising with Haruf; however, for some reason the end of this novel comes off like a sucker punch you watched connect with the side of your face, slow motion, in the reflecting window in front of you - which still lays you out.

The story is primarily Burdette's, the town bad boy and one time hero, told from the perspective of Arbuckle, conveniently enough, the town newspaperman. It opens with Burdette returning to Holt, Colorado after an eight year hiatus that the reader learns over the course of the next 150 or so pages was time spent on the run. The narrative moves back and forth from the present to long ago and recent past. It is full of well-developed, yet stunted, secondary characters. It is a novel in which the newspaper man spends his time watching a town where everyone is watching someone else. all. the. time.

Haruf's narrative is so successful for two reasons, in my humble. First, the narrator is true to form in his reportage of the events surrounding Burdette. The details of his story unfold as if they were told in an extended newspaper article, or a story and it's follow up. The level of detail never surpasses the barest facts, and while Haruf provides plenty of information from which the reader may draw all sorts of conclusions about the main character, the narrator never connects those dots for you.

Second, the parts that aren't centered on Burdette are told in similar prose, and yet, they come across more like the stories sisters share when they return to their home town for the holidays. The kind of catching up gossip that we all hear. And therein lies the rub. It is in the telling of these small details of the secondary characters that the tragedy of the book is driven home. These are sad, wandering, stilted human beings stuck spinning - cogs in the wheel - and we know them. Equally important, they know us. They tell our stories in the same broad strokes that we tell theirs and they draw the same conclusions we draw. That's the kind of sad with which this novel leaves you. The dull ache of hurt under the hand at your cheek three seconds after the punch you saw coming lands.

Home by Marilyn Robinson

2008-11-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

I should begin by saying that Housekeeping might be one of my all time favorite books ever and Gilead, while I loved it less, definitely moved me. I can pick up that book on any given day and read any paragraph just to be dazzled by Robinson's wicked control of the language. I am not a God kinda girl, but the image Robinson creates of the joy all humans should have when they come into contact with the miracle of water pops into my head at least weekly.

That is to say, I had crazy high hopes for Home, which was given to me by a friend a week ago. It took me that long to read it. Not because it isn't good, but because it doesn't require that you finish it. That the conclusion is a foregone from so early is part of the problem, but that's not entirely it. It's hard to explain. The pace of the novel invites a slow read, but that doesn't account for it either. The novel is infused with the same sort of moments you find in Gilead,

Somebody shouted fox and geese, and they all ran around to make the great circle, and then to make the diameters, breathless, the clover breaking so sweetly under their feet that they repented of the harm they were doing even as they persisted in it.

or

Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.

although they are fewer and further between. They are beautiful moments, but I don't care where they are leading even if I didn't already know. Neither the urgency of Gilead nor the adventure of Housekeeping are present in Home and although there could have been other means possible by which to propel the reader either of those would have worked beautifully. In the absence of any kind of forward inertia, the language was enough for this reader but probably not most.

That said, I do love a little melodramatic anything now and then and the final two pages of this novel deliver.