Literate Gnome Reviews

On Beauty (Zadie Smith)

2006-10-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

This is my second Zadie Smith book, the first being The Autograph Man, an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about opposites. In much the same way, On Beauty is an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about physical and mental attraction and worth. Yet again, there is the multi-ethnic smoothie that Smith loves to project upon every corner of the world--a white professor married to a black non-academic with three kids, one religious, one academic and one a horrifying and annoying parody of a rich black kid imitating glorified street culture. (Man that kid bothered me!) Just to add some more drama to the mix, let's throw conservatism against liberalism and art history against deconstructionism. Just for fun, you know, to see what fireworks happen.

Like a kid in a science lab, Smith seems to be dreaming up experiments and throwing them together to see the results, which she is naturally (and obviously in some areas) making up as she goes along. The result for me was that plot points seemed incredibly artificial and staged--sure, the protagonist's main enemy moves across the ocean to take a position at that specific university. Yep, really likely. Or the mid-life crisis with the balding man lusting after some hot, young student--couldn't she have taken a slightly unique tack on that one? Or the very talented yet poor boy who is buoyed up and ultimately crushed by the system of the insecure rich and over-educated. Nope, I never heard that one before, right?

Zadie Smith is not a bad writer. Quite the opposite. She strings together words into necklaces worthy of princesses in ball gowns and her characters can be strikingly memorable at points. But this book seems like a rushed and mismatched melting pot of ideas, a half-baked plan presented as a main course. And what did I learn about beauty? Not much. However, I did discover yet one more place that it is not. I guess that is something.

The Burn Journals (Brent Runyon)

2006-10-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

So I received a reading list in the mail from a writer's organization I used to be involved with at ASU, one that was too expensive for me to continue to be involved with, sadly. Sigh. They were putting together an online book club of sorts and, though I didn't really feel like paying any money to be a part of such a group, I have no problem using their free list for my own purposes when I can't seem to think of what I want to read next. This book was the October 2006 selection.

I guess I should have heeded the red flag in my head when I picked up the reserved book from my library and noticed a bright, green "Teen" label on the spine. Teen? I thought. Really? But I dismissed the thought because, after all, the recommendation had come from a reputable, college organization who wouldn't have me reading childish bullshit. And there are quite a few good novels that cross the border between adult and chidlren's lit. In my opinion, this did not turn out to be one of them.

The Burn Journals is the autobiographical tale of Brett Runyon, who set himself on fire when he was 15 in an attempt to commit suicide. He then survives a lengthy recovery and a change of heart about the purpose of his own life. While Brett is all grown up now, he still writes in the stilted and simplistic style of an adolescent boy, where he dismisses most emotional concerns in order to remember what then-popular program was on television. I think that Runyon is trying to explain why he would do such a thing with this book--I was wondering that too. Aside from some generic remarks about being "sad," I am still wondering. There are emotional currents beneath the surface, currents I wanted to explore but that the narrator supresses (out of vulnerability? embarassment?).

It was like a real, teenage boy was stitting there telling me this story, brushing off my questions, trying to be cool about it all. And I wanted to wring his neck and have him tell me what was really going on, even if he didn't quite know himself, even if the thoughts were incomplete and conclusionless. The book does serve a purpose within the genre so neatly stamped upon its spine: Every teen needs to know that they are not alone in having these nameless, unknowable, apocalyptic feelings and that, yes, they do pass. Things do get better, if not easier, with age because you have more control over yourself and your environment.

Runyon is doing the right thing reaching out to that group, especially the boys, who are under-represented in literature. But I have no idea why ASU would want me to read such a book or why they thought it would be worth discussing and critiquing as a group. I think the conversation would have only one basic thought and direction, something along the lines of:

"That was sad. I wish he hadn't done that to himself. But now, he can help other kids not set themselves on fire, plus he graduated college. Good for him."

To summarize, fire and depression bad. Helping others and sharing feelings good. Any questions?

The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay (Michael Chabon)

2006-10-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, this book by Michael Chabon is a sprawling story of two cousins, World War II, Judaism, the comic book industry, sexuality, masculinity and love. While the Pulitzer is always a reason to put a novel on my reading list, the fact that Chabon wrote Wonder Boys (a movie I adore though I admit *blush* I've never read the book) was an added inducement. With all of that in mind, this 650-page monster had a lot to live up to in my mind.

All-in-all, live up it did. It was a good book, one that sucked me in and kept my interest with round characters and plot twists. My eyes raced the words to see who would find out what happened first. It was the kind of book that makes me wish my lunch break were longer and makes my bath water grow cold around me, the bubbles popped and the water turning gray with soap. Yes, it was good....

And also very, how-you-say... boy. Honestly, that realization shouldn't be all that surprising when you consider that the tale is woven around the concept of the comic book. The main characters write and draw the books; debate the characters and their greater societal value; discuss the unconscious lure of the tales for American youth with their violence and clear-cut morality; and, most importantly, adopt on the aspects of the their creations in their real lives. This is very interesting and compelling in portions, especially when Chabon links artistic endeavors to action: art as a weapon in a situation when you are otherwise powerless, the ability of art to change opinions perhaps even more than action itself. I also love how the disguise of art is exposed: that artistic creation is often the mask an artist wears, revealing more of the true self on the page than in reality.

But, much like a comic book, this approach does have limitations as well. For one, the foreshadowing, which is far from subtle and feels more like a cartoon, Acme anvil falling from the sky. KA-BLAM. I instantly knew who was going to fall in love with who, who was lying, what choices and actions would be pivotal later in the story, who was going to die, etc. It says a lot that I cared for these characters enough that my heart reacted to these anvils--No! Don't say that, I would think. No! I like you too much for you to die. But most audiences don't like being treated like 8-year-old comic-loving boys--we don't like to be hit over the head with something as if we were stupid. We like to be surprised and, if the ending is going to be a happy one, I would prefer not to know that halfway through the book, reading the other half only to find out the specifics of that happiness and the route they were going to take to get there.

Very boyish. Predictable, in a way. I think Chabon does this consciously, mimicking the heightened sense of destiny, fate and morality that are the foundation of the comic universe. But it was very conscious to me as a reader as well, making me feel pandered to in some way. Plot points come around too easily, deserved success arrives, love will be thwarted at the most crusial moment, heroic actions spring from noble hearts, just desserts are served. Come and get ‘em!. By creating a comic book universe--one of such reverence, almost worship, for the art form, its creators and the golden age of its inception--Chabon made a story that couldn't exist in real life, that was fake and over-blown at its core.

Wow. That sounds like a really bad review when, in fact, I did enjoy this book immensely. I enjoyed it as a rollicking romp through a world of a boy's imagination, where obstacles crop up like icebergs but there is never any doubt about reaching port in safety. No doubts about the basic goodness of mankind, the love of friends and family, and, of course, the triumph of good over evil.

The Autograph Man (Zadie Smith)

2006-10-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

tandem
Function: adjective
1 : consisting of things or having parts arranged one behind the other
2 : working or occurring in conjunction with each other

It is an old (and bad), academic joke that there are three types of people in this world: those who can do math and those who can't. I was always in the invisible third category, the type who gets it wrong not because they are unable to do math but because they can't muster up enough interest to care. But it is no matter. We all know that there are two types of people in the world--those who like/do/have something and those who do not. Pick a topic, any topic, no matter how inconsequential and the formula will hold true. (Those who eat cocoa puffs and those who don't, those who are Scorpios, those who have hot tubs, those who are Russian...)

The fact that the main character in The Autograph Man is named Alex-li Tandem is significant when approached in this light. After all, Alex is an expert of categories. For starters, he is writing the quintessential book on jewish versus goyish tendancies and is an amalgamation of a Chinese father and a Jewish mother. He is an unknown failure who makes a living on the signatures of the famous. His girlfriend is black to his white, his two friends are a rabbi and a Kabbala devotee. At other various points there are cats and dogs, youth and age, fame and anonymity, etc and etc. And Tandem is our eyes upon this world of co-existing opposites that (of course) are only labels in the end which obscure our basic humanity.

Okay, so it's a good concept, a good gimmick if you will. Yin and Yang duality and the ethinic and religious smoothie (now with non-fat yogurt!) that is the modern world. Though this book was interesting and I don't regret reading it, that was all this theme was when the pages shuffled to the end and the cover shut--a gimmick. Cute and inspired in a blog post or SNL skit sort of way, but hardly the stuff of insightful literary fiction. Let me give you an example: the International Gesture. This is a phrase Smith uses in the book to describe characters' movements, as in "he made the International Gesture for the Jewish shrug" or "a lewd International Gesture" or "the International Gesture for lunacy (temple, tapping finger)." It was cute and funny the first time she used it. It got old and clumsy as it continued to be repeated, exposed for the hollow device it was.

Alex himself is also unfulfilling as a character. He is shallow, short-sighted, constantly drunk and immature. He has his redeeming qualities but most of them are his friends, who seemed much more genuine and "of this earth" tangible than Alex. In the end, I began to wonder why this assorted supporting cast continued to support and associate with Alex. They suffer his mistakes, clean up his vomit, forgive him his lies and say they love him. I kept saying, why? And where on earth does all of this schmuck's money come from, money for a trip from London to America, for a fancy hotel, for the empty hotel mini-bar? So much just falls from the sky unexplained in order to fill in the gaps in plot and characterization.

Zadie Smith is a very talented writer and her first novel--White Teeth--was all the rage when it was released. A hard act to follow. This sophmore effort turned out to be sophomoric as a result. Not bad, not unreadable but clumsy and with delusions of grandeur, cobbled together with bubble gum and celebrity. In the end, as in all things, there will be those that like Smith's The Autograph Man and those who won't. Or maybe there will be a large group of those that, like me, are capable of appreciating it but can't muster up enough interest to really care either way. Smith tried to lecture me about 1 divided by 2 equals 1/2 and 1/2 plus 1/2 equals the world. I doodled in my notebook and combatted drowsiness. Math is not my thing.

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

2006-10-01T19:46:00.000-07:00

Let me start by saying that I loved this book. Let me end by saying I don’t know if I fully understand this book. Now that I have sandwiched both ends of my thoughts about Cloud Atlas, I suppose I need to add the peanut butter and jelly.

Similar to my PB&J filling, David Mitchell crafts a story that is both rich and substantial as well as light but sticky. It is the second book I have read of late (the other being Specimen Days) that has experimented with segmenting a story over the lives of several unrelated people in distant time periods. We begin in the journal of an estate agent in 1850 traveling through the South Pacific back to his gold-rushing home of San Francisco. Then, jump to the letters of an open-minded (read: bisexual) young composer in the 1930s--> a cub reporter in the 1970s who stumbles upon a nuclear power conspiracy that endangers her life--> a mediocre, modern English publisher imprisoned in with age--> an interview with a human simulant from the Korea of the future--> and then finally travels to a primitive Hawaiian culture that struggles to retain civilization after "the fall." Each story jolts into one another, sometimes even in mid-page, often in the exact moment where you decide as a reader that you like this character more than the last.

Now here comes the great part. After the Hawaiian adventure, we travel the same road in reverse. Back through time to our American agent on a sea voyage. There! See? There! There is the exact moment where it is no longer possible to put down this unique and convoluted (yet becoming more and more unified) book. Clear the calendar and cancel all appointments. You are in for the long haul.

There's the peanut butter, Ladies and Gentlemen. And here's the jelly, aye, here's the rub. Again, I loved it. Mitchell paints every character with humanity and depth. He interweaves the tales without being heavy-handed, leaving bread crumbs and hints in tiny details. (Except the comet--you'll see--which was a bit too obvious) At the end, I could see Mitchell's message about human nature: the stronger preying on weaker, our hunger for power building and then tearing down our families/cultures/environment, about other sorts of hunger--for goods, wealth, fame, love, freedom--and slavery, both forced and voluntary.

In short, it made me think. A lot of thoughts. A lot of thoughts I can't quite synthesize as yet but can't get rid of, like a child's sticky fingers after lunch. I see that the book is a sort of Hegel-ian model of dialectic history--forgive me, I was a History major as well as English. Hegel thought that each idea/movement/governmental system/thesis brought into existence its opposite or antithesis. These combined will disappear. Like a + and a -, they become a 0, negate each other, mean nothing, annihilate both. Therefore, they will come into conflict and something else--a fusion of sorts, not necessarily an even one--will emerge.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my sticky fingers, sticky thoughts. Excellent thoughts as well. An excellent novel is one that will stick to your ribs (okay, okay, no more food analogies). Though I highly recommend this book, I will also recommend that you read it with a friend or in a book club. From my own experience, you will want someone to speak to about this. I feel I have a lot of ideas I need to test on another reader's ears or that I may have missed some important piece they picked up.

Here we go. Here's a solution---> Read it. Love it. Write me. Help me.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding)

2006-09-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

"Hell-oooo, Tom!" she says with a wolf whistle. How do you still look so dashing after, let's see... 257 years? What? How long? you may ask but I speak the truth. The character is just as dashing, humorous and entertaining as he was when this novel was first published in 1749. Sex! Sex in a novel from 1749?! Ah yes, 'tis true and oh-my-dear so funny.

Young, foolish, lustful, rougish, golden-hearted, loyal (sometimes) and handsome--Tom's is a typical foundling's tale. He is the product of sin, abandoned and raised by a benevolent man who grows up to have wild adventures, be disinherited by the benevolent man unjustly and be "unsuited" (meaning of low-birth and no money) for the woman he loves. But as with so many classic plotlines that have become trite with time, every obstacle thrown in the path will eventually be tidied up, all threads tied with the reader's amused smile.

I say, "Classic plotlines, typical tales." This is both yet neither. In fact, Fielding is often credited as being the inventor of the genre of the novel. Theater and poetry were the forms of the day, the ones those that were rich enough to read did read. Fielding instead decided to tell an entirely fictional tale (and admit it the fiction, which was shocking). To me, Fielding is truly a gifted author to have gotten the ball of fiction rolling (thank you from all readers, Henry!) and also due to his style. His tone and diction, though antiquated, are relatively easy to get used to as compared to Dickens and Co. Plus, I love the way he addresses the reader directly, a metafictional technique done centuries before we modern writers coined the term.

A great read, especially for those with a knack for such old style. For those who don't want to tackle the complex language, there is always the movie, which is also fantastic.

Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig)

2006-09-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

Another library bargain bin book, one I picked up before the move to tide me over until I got my new library card (always step one behind gas and electric). It is an Argentinian book translated from the Spanish and written all in dialogue, which I found quite fun. Pure speech and no description can wind up sounding vapid and fluffy but Puig pulls it off quite well.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is the story of two men in prison--one a political prisoner of the socialist persuasion and the other a homosexual in for "corrupting a minor." They have a great chemistry to see on the page and much of the book centers on the gay man's retelling of different movies. A great discussion of the known formulas and effect of the cinema, in a way.

What killed me was the footnotes. Okay, I know it is an older edition but the publisher thought illustrating a gay character was so controversial that they footnoted the hell out of his dialog. And, the comments weren't even related to what the character said but were instead a scholarly essay on homosexuality--was it innate or environmental, how do all the major psychiatrists weigh in, what do recent studies suggest? I swear there was at least 20 pages of these footnotes in 9 pt font.

What the hell? I just wanted to hear him talk some more about films and see the tension between the two prisoners. Oh, and the sex scene was pretty fascinating as well. Gay sex, told all through dialogue. I'm sure you can imagine the one syllable exchanges taking place there. Very Brokeback. I think that one scene is probably why they thought they needed all the explanation about homosexuality. But, come on! I'm not going to hate the character just because he's gay! Then again, I live in today's world and an American world--not Puig's. Perhaps not the publisher's.

All in all, an entertaining read, intructive for the somewhat successful use of use dialogue and the--whoo hoo--hot sex. I liked kissing the Spider Woman. I don't know if we can ever be more than friends. I just don't like her that way. You know, that way. But she's a fun date.

Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham)

2006-09-17T21:07:00.000-07:00

Michael Cunningham is an odd duck. I don't mean that in a bad way. In fact, I quite admire his work. Like every other literate person on earth, I adored The Hours. A Home at the End of the World, well, no so much (see here). I say odd then because it has been more than two weeks since I finished the book as I sit to write the review and I still don't know quite what to think of it.

Did I like it? Yes. Post-modern stylings with timeless style. That's Cunningham. Much like in The Hours, he interweaves time and space. And literary characters. In the former, it was Virginia Woolf. In this work, it is Walt Whitman. The book is divided into three parts, all taking place in New York City.

1. 19th Century during the Industrial Revolution, Whitman's own age
2. Close to the present day, post-911 and alert for terror
3. The future, when androids are possible and the world is going to hell in a handbasket (Well, faster than it is now)

In each tale there are three characters: a man, a woman and Walt Whitman. They change roles and experience vastly different plotlines, all centered upon the lust for life and disdain for the mechanization of man in Whitman's work. Oh, and the freeing nature of death. Very interesting. Very different. Very successful? Maybe not.

I absolutely loved the first tale, narrated by a young boy with limited mental faculties who must begin work in a typical (dangerous) foundry. It was mystic, melancholy and foggy. The characters touched me and the events surprised me. I was thinking, "This is The Hours all the way."

Then, the second book hit with a thud for me. This one had a female narrator who was a sort of terrorist negotiator. There were parts that were excellent, including a revelation regarding the boy at the end. Yet it felt too aciton-adventure-like. Like, if it were a movie, Angelia Jolie would play the lead and Haley Joel Osment the little boy. Canned, you know? Like he didn't quite pull it off. The third book was also interesting, narrated from an androids perspective. But again, this one felt as if a Pulitzer Prize winning author was trying his hand at Sci-Fi.

I have nothing against genre fiction. Honestly. I just don't know if this book elevated itself to the realm of literary fiction. Sometime I think yes because scenes and themes from the book have been returning to my thoughts, a sure sign of a book that touched me. Yet, I also was looking forward to starting my next book before this one was done, a sure sign that something is amiss.

I don't know about this one. He took a risk and I applaud that. The literary world is a better, richer place because he took that risk. I just don't know if Evil Knevil actually cleared all of those barrels or if he missed and is seriously injured. It is as if I am a member of the crowd, waiting for the smoke to clear to see if he is still standing.

Will Specimen Days stand the test of time? I think I will have to wait for the smoke to clear.

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

2006-09-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Insest, sex, gender, love, sexuality, abnormality, belonging, sex.... Oh, I said sex already? Sorry.

The novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of the Virgin Suicides) is the enthralling epic of a Greek family come to America and the tracing of their genetic blunders down to the third generation when--oops--a little something strange appeared. We are all a product of the past, a concoction of the events and characteristics of the people who came before. The narrator of this book just gets to consciously tag along, watching over grandparents' shoulders like a disembodied, time-travelling fairy. From the old world to the new, from World War I to the 1970s, this narrator reveals rich, compelling characters that you love despite their faults, that your heart pangs for when you realize (before they do) what is truly going on.

Sit down, hold on, clear your schedule and make way for Middlesex: a book that won the Pulitzer Prize for damn good reason by an author who has never failed to disappoint me. Eugenides takes the family epic, a plotline usually reserved for light historical fiction or sweeping romances, and elevates it to the highest level of literary fiction. Jeffrey, if you are out there somewhere, will you adopt me/teach me/trade places with me? I promise to call you a genius everyday, bring coffee into your office and feed paper sheet by sheet into the back of your typewriter if you promise to pound out another book to entertain, fascinate and move me.

Blue Rage, Black Redemption (Stanley Tookie Williams)

2006-09-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

You must be wondering how something so uncharacteristic made its way onto my reading list. Frankly, I wondered several times in the middle of the book myself, times when I would rather have closed it, put it down and used it as a doorstop. But sadly, I had to read this memoir of Stanley Tookie Williams (the co-founder of the Crips gang) as part of a work assignment.

Not that the man is uninteresting--hardly. He grew up mean and tough and, if you can't tell from the picture, built like a brick shithouse. As he liked to say, he was "yoked." Regardless of several chances to reform his criminal ways in his youth, Tookie made himself King Crip and took pride in his recruiting and leadership abilities within the gang. Then, he was jailed for two separate intances of murder--four lives total--and sentenced to death.

So ended the "Blue" portion of his life and his "black redemption" phase dawned. After a long stint in solitary, separated for the first time in his life from his peers, he began to educate himself and came to see the error of his ways. In fact, he became an avid anti-gang activist, wrote several childrens books and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thankfully, in my opinion, he did not win.

Again, I am not saying anything negative about the man himself. His story is rather inspirational, probably more so to someone who has more gang exposure than I. What drove me nuts was the way in which the book was written. The self-educated vocabulary peppered with 1960s slang and the obvious pride Tookie still had for the power of his youth turned me off. If you are interested in the life of Williams--or are forced to read about him for work or school--flip to the center for the pictures. By far the most enjoyable part of the book were the unbelievably bulging muscles and the foot tall Afros in those photos.

Snowflower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See)

2006-08-24T16:43:00.000-07:00

In the popular fashion of Memoirs of a Geisha, this book tells the life story of a woman of Chinese descent. But Geisha takes place in Japan, not China, and Geisha is not nearly as ancient. Nonetheless, it is female-driven historical fiction at its finest. That is not to say the novel is literary fiction. Hardly. Far from. The fun of this novel lies in it’s somewhat realistic depiction of historical facts, not in the transcendent quality of the tale or writing style. In other words, I wouldn’t call it art. (Yes, yes. I am a horrible literary snob. I admit it.)

If any book is Oprah-worthy, it could be this one. Decently long and educated yet touching on all the aspects of ancient life that modern women would find interesting—gender equality, foot-binding, arranged marriages, etc. Naturally, as I modern woman I found these things interesting. Foot-binding? Yech.

The best theme present in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is the secret female language of Nu Shu. This is a series of characters entirely different from the male Chinese language that was supposed to be known by only women. They embroidered characters into cloth, painted them on fans… and kept them out of men’s hands. Nu Shu was a way for women to say what they really felt in a restrictive world that wouldn’t allow them to otherwise. When a woman died, all of her Nu Shu was burned at her gravesite so her words would travel with her to the next world. When a young child passed, those words would introduce the child to friends and ancestors who had passed before. A great concept and very interesting from a social history point of view.

In the end, it is only historical fiction—a cute tale told within the confines of historical fact, an entertaining story about what could have happened. Not what actually happened. Such is obvious. Real life never has the high drama and tragedy of fiction, the crystallized lessons learned, the perfect balance and integration of themes. That is always manufactured and that is always, in the end, why historical fiction is not transcendent to me.

Tell me a true story—one that happened in actuality, no matter how dry or uneven or anticlimactic the facts are. Or, tell me a true story—one of literary fiction, where the emotions and ideas ring true to my heart and mind, where the people and events may not exist in the outside world but they express truth nonetheless, hitting the nail on the head. Yes yes, I know. I’m a snob.

But I did like this book. I did. If only because it made me witness the process of foot-binding on the page and imagine the sound of breaking bones as you walking across the floor with your toes curled underneath the arch of your foot. Holy hell, ouch!

An Invisible Sign of Her Own (Aimee Bender)

2006-08-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

I am a huge fan of Aimee Bender’s work: her first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and her latest collection, Willful Creatures. This is her first full-length project and it was actually published between the two sets of stories. This was a good book. It was. If anyone else wrote it, I would write a nice, fluffy and downy-fresh review and leave it at that. But this is a Bender and so I cannot be so simple. Frankly, I know that this is not as good as her previous work.

Hmm. You may ask, Why? Well, for one, her other work is incredibly hard to live up to in my mind. Her unique imagination and crisp style. Each tale is an encapsulated whole. Her ideas are so wild that maybe it is better that way. Maybe those ideas don’t have the elasticity to stretch over the frame of a traditional novel. In other words, the strange wild and wacky world she usually succeeds at creating wears thin in points to show the real world poking through from underneath.

An Invisible Sign of My Own is the story of a 20-year-old young woman who understands the world through mathematics. She also lives her life every moment with her father’s illness in mind, an illness that is not really a disease at all but more of a colorless gloom of depression and surrender. So she too makes a habit of surrendering everything. In fact, she is an expert quitter. Everything she finds herself liking or growing attached to she immediately gives up—by force if necessary. For example, in order to give up sex, she sickens herself by eating soap thereby linking dirty sex and nauseating clean at the same time.

I do like the premise behind the title. It is based off the actions of the neighbor who also happens to be the girl’s former math teacher. He wears a different wax number on a string around his neck each day based upon his mood. If it’s a wretched day where he can barely get out of bed, he might sport a 7. If he falls in love or goes on vacation, his number could rise as high as 80. The main character, understanding his system, can understand and sympathize with his mood. But who is paying attention to her invisible signs? In truth, no one can see the number, the grade, the ranking of our feelings behind the mask of our faces, making math the universal language of… what? Not humanity. Of isolation? Of over-simplification? Maybe. An interesting concept.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the book. It flew by like the rest of her writing and I recommend it for a bit of light, fun reading. I just have a feeling that this mathematical main character will not have the sticking power of other bender creations—the de-evolving boyfriend, the “mother-fucker,” etc…

Tortilla Flat (John Steinbeck)

2006-08-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

This is the second Steinbeck novel I have found for sale in the libraries remnant bin—the second-hand shelf where they get rid of books that they don’t want to keep on their shelves any more for various reasons. While I am happy to get a copy of this book (I have read it before but do not own it), I am also sad. What is the state of our library system that they toss out Steinbeck with the morning’s refuse? Where is the love I ask you? I comfort myself with the thought that new editions are simply becoming available and the libraries are restocking their shelves with better, brighter copies with which to educate the future generation of readers. I hope.

Steinbeck. Two syllables of greatness. Sometimes I have a hard time pinning down just what it is that makes Steinbeck so fun to read. It’s not as if he reinvents the wheel or as if poetry, a river deep and swirling, drips from his pen like a, like a… okay, I’m no poet either. Steinbeck is simply an excellent story-teller (look here, for instance) and Tortilla Flat is no exception.

The short, speedy novel is the tale of a group of friends recently returned from WWI, paisanos (of mixed Indian, Spanish and European blood) who love their wine and women. These characters are unique and human, humorous, bumbling, touching. Their world is so simple and easy in a way. Having property may be a great status symbol but is not worth it because of the headache. Disgrace and sin are not characterized by adultery or theft. Instead, honor lies in sharing a jug of wine or a cut of pork with a friend. Oh, did I mention the wine?

“Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. To inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen.”

Oh please. Take me to a time and place (and to a people) that prizes sitting in the sun barefoot in the morning, working only sporadically (usually to buy wine or throw a party), stealing in a Robin Hood context, pulling the wool over outsiders’ eyes. A society where a man who sleeps under the stars, had no bed to call his own and steals chickens from his neighbors can still be a “good” man. And if not “good,” at least endearing, entertaining and memorable.

Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stenger)

2006-08-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

I really don't understand how Stenger can justify calling this book Crossing to Safety. In truth, the characters seem to be firmly aground in the land of safety from beginning to end. In other words--nothing fucking happens. Published in the 1970s, this book is the autobiographical musings of the narrator about his and his wife's friendship with another couple that began in the 1930s. They have and lose jobs, they succeed and fail, they have lots of babies, endure disease and disappointment as well as enjoy each other's company through (wow! can that really be so fun?) sing-a-longs and oral poetry discussion (at parties no less!).

It is the story of ordinary, well-lived lives and the narrator digresses on this matter at the end of the book. Being the writer, he is urged toward the end of their lives to capture the legacy of these life-long friends. He ponders, "How do you make a book that anyone would read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicious waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends?"

As I read along, I asked myself, "Where indeed? Give me alcohol, drugs and kinky sex in order to save me from smothering in the smarm fest." Why then did I continue reading this "smarm fest," as I would like to call it? Well, the lives of these people (though boring and glowingly girl-scout perfect) are exactly the romanticization of what I would want my life to be. The narrator is a college professor, a writer, a novelist. His buddy is a professor of literature. They walk around being rich through inheritance, with big beautiful antique roadsters (I love those!) and wives with bobbed haristyles (I love those, too!). They spend the school year teaching and cocktail partying only to retire to their country lake house for three months in the summer. The writers and professors have their own "think shacks" where they slave away for academia and posterity until the afternoon swim, nap and sun-downer.

I continued reading out of pure envy. Whaa-ha-ha, I am the evil green monster reader from hell who will feed my hunger for life by sucking your book of beauty and then diss you in public. I am going to go to my think shack now and sulk.

The Long Haul (Amanda Stern)

2006-08-03T19:32:00.000-07:00

The Long Haul—are you in for it? In other words, can you commit to a relationship for the good times and the bad, for better or for worse? In Amanda Stern’s (obviously first) book, she explores the character of a young woman of college age who commits to a relationship that is doomed from the beginning to be nothing but “worse.” Her committed partner is the needy, co-dependant, controlling and unstable character simply referred to as “the alcoholic.” In the main character’s defense, I will say that at least the alcoholic plays the guitar—musical talent and rock-star potential forgive so many other glaring errors in female eyes, right?

There are things I like about the book. I love the boyfriend’s moniker/alias, that we never know his true name. I like the structure of the book. It’s short, quick, flowing. In a way, it’s a series of related short stories more than a traditional novel and I like that. On the other hand, it seems a bit played out. Unoriginal and faded with all the experimentation with time and perspective that has characterized literary fiction in the last decade or so.

Sadly, Stern’s book is simply dated. Although it was only published in 2003, the form (as mentioned above) and also the subject matter seems to me to be pure adolescent 1990s. And as a child of the Cobain generation, I suppose I should know. The main character is all about her psychiatric troubles—even cutting is mentioned—dresses in baggy boyish digs and eventually succumbs to depression, not leaving her bed for days on end. It’s all very Prozac Nation, if you ask me. Self-involved, very drama-rama-dramatic—not necessarily bad traits but, again, very adolescent. This made the main character un-relatable in my eyes and the alcoholic purely pathetic. I mean, couldn’t you make me actually feel something for the bastard?

The kicker that dates this piece is the musical repetition at one point of a Jane’s Addiction song (Jane Says) last released in 1990:

Jane says / I’m done with Sergio / He treats me like a rag doll…

Well, Gnomey says, I’m done with the Long Haul. It treated me like it was 1995. I’m sure as an adolescent myself, I would have appreciated the dark, brooding nature of this book. But now, it only seems interesting and promising but flat and unoriginal. Dated before it was even released. Sorry, Amanda. Nothing personal, darling.

Every Inch of Her (Peter Sheridan)

2006-07-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I described Aimee Bender's work as a delicious cheesecake that I rationed out in order to make the pleasure of the reading last. Since I am all keen on the food analogies, then, I feel that Every Inch of Her would be more like a bag of potato chips or of movie popcorn. Also tasty, quick and easy to consumer but also high in fat and leaving you with a feeling you need something a bit more substantial in your gullet for supper.

This book is the tale of a large, loud Irish woman named Philo (short for Philomena instead of the pastry dough, though I am sure the author thought of the latter too). Everything is a mess in the beginning of the novel and it is the main character's mission to set all to rights in a bumbling, almost accidental and humorous way. Plus, I am sure you can guess, you get to meet all the colorful characters that populate Philo's Dublin neighborhood--in a third-person omniscient style that floats back and forth between characters, a weak device if you ask me to show what is happening without any effort or skill.

On the plus side, the ending had a few surprises and the main character was likeable and unique. I suppose I would classify the book as Chick Lit, worth reading on an airplane or at the gym, where the skipping of a line or two of text in the bouncing of the eliptical machine wouldn't be by any means tragic. Plus, the constant references to obesity may keep you motivate to exercise just a few minutes more.

Willful Creatures (Aimee Bender)

2006-07-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Aimee Bender's work is excellent, unique and very hard to categorize. I suppose I would think of her stories as I do my own dreams--random, wacky and horrific while simultaneous humorous--which I then wake up from to see how symbolic and telling those sleeping visions really are. They are simple yet sharp, leaving me wondering why no one (meaning me) could have pinned down that idea before or how someone (meaning me) could take inspiration from the story to create another something just as meaningful.

I simply love this woman's writing with the same passion as I did when first introduced to it through The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Though I love and idolize it, I think it may be impossible to ever recreate. If anything, the inspiration a writer can glean from Bender is to treat all their ideas with the utmost seriousness, to never leave a small inspiriation by the wayside. Want to write a story about a woman with potatoes for children? Do it, it could be poignant and touching. Want to tell the story of a husband and wife who kill each other solely for their preference in food spice? Go for it, that tale could symbolize the contradictory nature of love, as in opposites attract and also drive each other bonkers.

In order to give you an idea of what this Incredible Ms. Bender is all about, let me quote you the first paragraph of the collection of stories, from a tale called Death Watch:

"Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don't know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands. The doctor comes out of his office and apologizes, to the dead man.

Dang it, he says sheepishly, to his collegues. Looks like I got the day wrong again.

One can't account for murder or accidents, says another doctor in his bright white coat."

I looked at this book the same way I would a tasty dessert--a cheesecake, a box of sorbet or anything chocolate. The moment I had opened it, I wanted to devour it completely and yet I forced myself to pace it, unwilling to let the experience end too quickly. The moment I closed the cover, I mourned that there are not more Aimee Bender books I could lay my hands on ASAP. In the end, I am thankful for the sweet experience and also that books aren't high in calories or fat. It's just that the truly delicious ones often appear to be few and far between.

While I Was Gone (Sue Miller)

2006-07-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

While I Was Gone was apparently an Oprah Book Club selection. When I see that tradmark insignia, the book usually grows a ten-foot pole to keep me away. However, this book was being sold at a library fund raiser to the tune of a whole, whopping $0.75 and so I said okay. I would give it a try. Do I regret it? No. Do I relish it? Also no.

This is the story of a woman who thought she had everything she wanted--or was supposed to want--a husband in medical school, a entry-level teaching job--when the 1960s caught up with her. She found herself a waitress, leaving her husband, fleeing the city and rooming in a communal house in Boston. So, I love that part of the story. I too graduated college and felt a thrill at "slumming" (author's words, not mine) as a waitress or in other non-career-oriented professions. A way of finding yourself and exploring the world outside of the supposed to's.

My liking tapered off from there. After that point, it is the reflections of a grown-up narrator, now a vetrinarian and married to a minister, of her commune friend's death and the old friend she runs into that sheds new truth upon the old (but not quite healed) issue. A mystery, a thriller evolves from there. Okay, it was interesting and it turned the pages. What I turned the pages towards (meaning the ending) left something to be desired. If you are going to be a thriller, have a thrilling ending. If you plan on being a drama, lose the thriller tone and plotline.

Overall rating: a vacation read at best, a book club selection at worst. Bookshelf worthy? No, I think this bargain book will return to the library from whence it came to be sold again for another $0.75. After all, our struggling libraries have to pay the bills.

Pricksongs and Descants (Robert Coover)

2006-07-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

Robert Coover is a significant figure in the history of writing as the father of metafiction. Everyone who studies modern American literature will--or should--have studied his work, especially his quintessential story, The Babysitter, which is included in this anthology. How to explain Coover... hmmm.

Well, there are second-person narrated game show scenes where the object of the game is to avoid death. There is a magician who pulls more than rabbits out of his hat and, tragically, fails to pull out a sexy, protruding ass from the black brim. There is a magic poker, a little red riding hood remake and much much more. Be prepared for anything and for short paragraphs with alternating points of view, realities and voices. Confusion is the beauty, don't you see? No? Well, you will when you get the hang of it.

Read, live, love. Coover--my hero--was essential in the development of the curriculum at Brown, where I would attend school if sheer will were the only necessary component.

Walden (Henry David Thoreau)

2006-07-04T08:14:00.000-07:00

Ah yes. Our infamous friend Mr. Henry David. All of us have heard the name and perhaps a well-known quote or two ("suck the marrow" and all that) but few of us have actually read his tome to rural simplicity and individual development. Outside the classroom, that is. Herein was my problem. I have read such thick and meaningful books in a school setting. Something about the deadlines and mandatory discussions makes the pages flip regularly if not speedily. On my own, however.... Sigh.

I am still on page 172 out of 303. And it has been almost three weeks. No, no. It has been three weeks. If you take a look at the speed I normally read, you will see how arduous this has become. I finished all of the other books I had out on loan from the library in an effort to focus on my Thoreau. I figured I should apply some of the author's principles--I would take away all distractions in order to expand my mind and improve myself. I would forego the easy pleasure of modern life (i.e. entertaining novels) and seclude myself with something that would possibly change my life. Didn't work. Instead of turning to Walden when I needed a reading fix (usually two or three times a day), I glanced at it, sighed, and turned on the television.

Being a lover of literature and a aspiring author, I feel it is my duty to read such classics. Who am I to hope to add to literary history if I cannot appreciate those who came before. My effort will karmically be rewarded when, 150 years from now, some future reader will laboriously try to read my books, struggling over my antiquated slang and phrases. I agree that:

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but carved out of hte breath of life itself."

Is the book that bad that I couldn't finish it? you ask. I never said it was bad. It was very, very good in ways. Deep, touching and meaningful. A few pages of deep, touching and meaningful without a story, however, is an excellent generic form of Ambien. I must say that Mr. Henry was a very interesting fellow. He walked away from the urban life he knew (partially because the tax man was on his ass). He "squatted" on piece of unclaimed land--as if that is anywhere near possible anymore--and built a little house for exactly $28.12 1/2 (he includes an itemized table). The book goes on as an isolated man's journal, divided into sections based upon the theme of the musings i.e. the ponds, the village, the bean fields, winter animals, etc.

Being a bit of an introvert myself, I love Thoreau's escapists spirit:

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications... The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him."

I was drawn towards the journey of solitude and contemplation, where only the amount of time necessary to remain living is devoted to work and the rest to contemplation, reading and writing. Lord, what a life! Though Mr. Henry delivers this, he also added a spin I didn't expect, this upbeat and positive attitude of "Yay humanity!" where I was expecting "Hey humanity! See you later, sucker!" He says he appreciates his fellow men more at a suitable remove yet also claims that his journey is not an "ode to dejection" but instead an attempt to wake up those around him, enlightening them to his point of view. To me, this is the same as finding the perfect isolated and undiscovered beach and then going home to tell all your friends about it, inviting them to come on down next time around. Screw that. Okay, that's a bit bitchy. I guess I would say to my friends, "Having a beach is great but, then again, some prefer the mountains. Either way, find your own specific chunk of nirvana and hike away from my Walden, okay?"

I want to finish this book. I will finish this book. I want to use this book as background in a character sketch for a story I have been working on. Therefore, the library will just have to wait to get it back until I find the isolated days, weeks and months I will need to finish it. They will have to deal with a few dogeared pages.

As for isolating it with no other books on my plate, well, that ain't going to work for me. I have already started the joyous ride of Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover. Stay tuned for that discussion next episode. Same time. Same station.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)

2006-06-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Wallflower is technically a Young Adult/Teen novel. At least, that is what is laminated neatly onto the spine of the copy I checked out from the library. It’s the story Charlie, a high school freshman struggling with the normal pressures and overly dramatic situations of the teen years, a story told through Charlie’s letters to an anonymous someone. Since it was recommended to me by a good friend that I conquered that adolescent experience with, I figured it would be worth a try.

In the end, I would say that it was. With simple phrasing and little vocabulary words (which did get a bit “Dick and Jane” in areas), Charlie does relate a compelling tale. It was a good book to not get out of bed with on a Sunday morning. At least, that’s what I did. I finished it up before finally getting my lazy ass up to complete a deadline for a story I was writing.

It was more than a trifle predicable. Charlie reads all the coming-of-age books in school—Catcher in the Rye, Separate Peace, Mockingbird, etc—that the novel itself hopes to emulate. Except the author attempts to modernize the theme with references to Nirvana, currently popular drugs, homosexuality and sexual… well, sexual stuff. I won’t divulge any spoilers.

The problem with modernization is that everything eventually becomes dated—the book’s multiple references to “mix tapes,” for example. The quality of the story has to outweigh those outdated elements and many of the stories Charlie reads in school do this well. Wallflower, however, will never be among those classics. While interesting and, yes, touching, it just doesn’t have the oomph. See oomph for further explanation or listen to Oomph! To be further confused.

Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)

2006-06-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

So David Sedaris makes me look a little psycho. No, not in comparison to his sanity—Ha! As if! Not by pointing out the oddities of my character but because, when I read this book, I couldn’t help but talk to myself, exclaiming about Sedaris’ witticisms. And, yes, laughing out loud. Very loud. It went a bit like this…

The Boyfriend: “What on earth are you doing in there?”

Me: “Sedaris.”

The Boyfriend: “Ah.”

I finally saw that reading the funny bits aloud to The Boyfriend was also unproductive. He could barely understand me—reading fast with excitement and laughing over all the words, having to back track to pertinent sections. He must have thought he was watching me share and inside joke with myself. Or, with a book. Normally I just keep such jokes between you and me, my beloved internet.

Me Talk Pretty is witty, sharp and, as if you couldn’t guess, very funny. The book is a collection of autobiographical tales relating to Sedaris’ inability to communicate with the outside world. It begins with his childhood lisp and his trusty thesaurus, which would provide an s-less an alternative to any word. It follows Sedaris into adulthood, living abroad in Paris and attempting the evil and malicious French language. Literally translating all those French phrases—such as the movie Is it Necessary to Save the Private Ryan?—and regaling the native population with his mastery of one word. The word? Ashtray. Quite handy over there.

A great contribution to the pursuit of “reading for pleasure.” I place quotes around that for those of you who may not have tried or even heard of the concept. I guarantee that for you, especially for you my non-reader friends, this book is so fun and easy that it just may change your mind.

Arranged Marriage: Stories (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)

2006-06-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

Being a woman of average American roots (meaning that I’m a mixed-breed, European mutt), I really enjoy sneak peaks into the lives and thoughts of other cultures. That experience of the sneak peak is the definition of this book. Divakaruna chronicles the stories of various women of Indian descent and their experiences within or regarding arranged marriage. Light, easy and very plot-driven, it is a fun little read.

That said, let’s get to the criticism. Sure, I would love to find our more about what it is really like to be in an arranged marriage. Most of these short stories, however, only relayed stereotypical events and attitudes that I could have pulled out of my own American head. Things like chauvinism, the preference for male children over female, the difficulty of obeying your (or your husband’s) elders, the disparity between the old country and the new life in America, the debate over educating women… I like some of the small sensory details like the feel and delicate pattern of a sari and the smells of India that make a native nostalgic. These details, however, were few and often repeated—in different stories, from supposedly different women’s lips. Both of these facts made the book, sure, interesting but flat. Predictable.

I believe a lot of these feeling come stem from the fact that the book was published in 1996. Much of the content would probably have felt newer then. As it stands, Arranged Marriage is simply a readable but not laudable collection of tales geared toward a female audience.

Desolation Angels (Jack Kerouac)

2006-06-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

One summer, old Jacky was stationed on Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains with a view of a small mountain named Hozomeen. Though he claims to have been without mind-altering substances, this is what his cocaine-fueled brilliance captured on the page:

“The void is not disturbed by any kind of ups and downs, my God look at Hozomeen, is he worried or tearful? Does he bend before storms or snarl when the sun shines or sigh in the late day drowse? Does he smile? Was he not born out of madbrained turmoils and upheavals of raining fire and now’s Hozomeen and nothing else? Why should I choose to be bitter or sweet, he does neither?—Why can’t I be like Hozomeen and O Platitude O hoary old platitude of the bourgeois mind ‘take life as it comes…’

Does the Void take any part in life and death? Does it have funerals? Or birth cakes? Why not I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, beyond even gladness, just Old Jack (and not even that)…

Hold still, man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and simply be—be—be the infinite fertilities of the one mind of infinity, make no comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting stars of thoughts, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what it is, it is only what it always is—Hope is a word like a snow-drift—This is the Great Knowing, this the Awakening, this is Voidness—So shut up, like, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry—Prunes, prunes, eat your prunes—And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void—“

Geek Love (Katherine Dunn)

2006-06-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

Now this simple cover may point at technology with it's modern bright orange and block script. You may think, aww, how cute, a story of nerd romance perhaps involving online dating, thick glasses, hacker tan and awkward pauses. You would be wrong, however. Turn back traveler for there are rocks ahead! The word "geek" in this context is referring to the carnival/side show variety--the person who bites the heads off of live chickens with nothing but their own pearly whites, washing themselves in poultry blood, is called a "geek." Ahh, yes. You may get where this novel is going now.

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carnival family led by Al Binewski and his wife (an ex-Bostonian socialite and ex-geek) Crystal Lil. Frustrated at his inability to find and keep reliable circus freaks on hand, Al had the inspiration that he and Lil should simply create their own family of performers by dosing the pregnant mother with various concoctions of illegal drugs and toxins. What results is the most, ahem, unique family in the history of modern literature: Arturo the Aquaboy (with fins where limbs should be), Electra and Iphigenia the siamese twins (sharing a set of legs and sprouting at the waist into two, talented at piano duets), Olympia the side show barker (an albino, hunchback dwarf) and Fortunato (who appears entirely normal but is powerfully telekinetic).

The narrator is Olympia ("Oly"), who is the third or fourth child of the Binewskis (depending on whether you are counting heads or asses). She chronicles the story of her family from her childhood into the present with startling depth and seriousness. Sure, you will laugh. I guarantee that much. What surprises the reader is the true humanity that Dunn instills in her characters, even through their abnormality, even while they are talking about removing algae from Arturo's tank from the hard to reach spot behind his balls. Remember, he has no arms!

The story is also far from humorous. While bizarre and perverse, the events feel amazingly real, as if the reader has a tangible if odd-smelling handle to hold during the gripping sections. You will be shocked with Dunn's daring and also at her ability to take all that oddity and somehow transform it into understandable messages of belonging, love, identity and human (even such freakish humans) purpose.

This is the second time I have read this book and I still sped my way to the finish, enthralled in Oly's tale. Geek Love is a one of a kind read and a testament to Dunn's talent--not to take the everyday and make it extraordinary but instead to take the strange, the weird and the twisted and transform it into something universally touching and poignant.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

2006-05-22T20:53:00.000-07:00

This read had been a long time coming for me. It's been on my recommended list for years and yet whenever I am confronted with the limitless possibilites of a bookstore or library shelf, Kundera's name slips from my mind on a slapstick banana. The moment I picked it up, however, the pages flew by the same way--with slippery speed and laughter.

I would consider this book to be a good example of meta-fiction. I remember a graduate workshop I took where all the older students kept saying, "Dude, that is so meta" much to my confusion. In this case, however, I will quote them. Meta, man, very meta. Meta, of course, meaning written with the conscious desire to display the work as in the act of being written. Meaning the author is playing with the writer/reader relationship, often making the reader a participant in the action of the story. Let me quote the text itself:

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border (the border beyond which my own 'I' ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to [the story]."

With this technique, Kundera creates an interesting frappe of philosophy and character. He bases each of his main characters on a philosophic principle and then stretches this principal for the course of the character's existence. I love how these principals, though, seem to me to be bathroom or bus philosophical realizations. Let me explain--random thoughts that occur in places where it is impossible to discuss or write down for future discussion, ideas that seem very deep at the time and drift away like feathers when remembered later, leaving you disappointed at what you thought was your brilliance and wisdom. Examples of Kundera's principals in action:

The character of Tereza: Is it possible to see your personality on the surface of your skin as you look in a mirror?
The character of Tomas: How can we know our choices are good or bad if we only experience them once, which offers no second consequence for comparison?

I highly recommend this entertaining novel, which is not as descriptive as I normally enjoy. It is instead highly cognitive and humorously so. Check out his discourse on shit and kitch and Stalin's son's suicide. Excellent shit, if you don't mind the pun.

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

2006-05-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

A portrait of a lady named Dalloway. A portrait of every soul that walks the streets of London. A portrait of one spring day in June. As the famous sentence goes,

"In the people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane over head was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June."

Woolf's (at the time revolutionary) stream of consciousness can be considered a map of the human psyche and a true representation of thought. I've heard that. I can see it. Truth of the matter is that, one by one, all of her well-crafted sentences and characters and chain reactions of words flowing from rock to rock in the creek of humanity are amazing. Like museum pieces under glass to be studied, ooooohed, and lit from the right angle in an acid-free environment for future generations enjoyment and education. Ming vases or King Tut's crispy bandages.

All strung together, though, it can be a bit much to take. That river is hard to trudge against. Not that it isn't worth the journey--I recommend it as heartily as I do backpacking in the Grand Canyon. And no, watching The Hours and staring at Nicole Kidman's enhanced nose will not cut it! However, I tried to read this on the treadmill and wound up repeating the same paragraph at least four times. It's quite easy to lose track of the subject of the sentence and have to backtrack in search of a noun.

I love Woolf not only for what she writes but for what she represents to the modern world--feminine author, equal marriage, equal rights, mental instability, the coexistance of genius and madness, and the incredibly powerful symbolic image of walking into a river with stones in your pockets. Man, what woman hasn't contemplated such a poignant passing in moments of delicious desperation--the beauty of death and through an act that replicates literally the feelings that are weighing you down. I can just see her stirring the stones around her palm with a resigned yet sly smile on her face. Don't write me love notes of encouragement now. I'm not suicidal--just overly dark and Woolfish. Grrrr.

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B (Sandra Gulland)

2006-05-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

May the 8th, the year 2006:

Today I am reading a piece of historical fiction about the early life of Josephine Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon, that was written as a journal. This interesting (and overdone) historical character lived through the French Revolution, the Terror (when she was imprisoned as a member of the aristocracy), the Commune, and obviously Napoleon's rise to power. The dates and such are meticulously researched, I'm sure... i.e. what party she went to on what night and when she went to the country and etc. Kind of sad, really, the kind of research needed to write such a piece of absolute fluff.

May the 9th, of the year 2006:

Good gym reading. Napoleon character was quite curious and intriguing but only entered in the last 40 pages. The book actually ends on their wedding night, in bed, where her dog bites his leg and he stitches up the wound himself. Best scene of the whole damn thing. Turns out this book is only part one of two. I consider reading the second part simply because this one scene has peaked my interest so much. Will sleep on it.

May the 10th, of the year 2006:

What the hell are you thinking?! You only read this one because it was in the used book bin for $0.50! This "historical fiction" could be an advertisement for Snuggle--it's fluffy, soft, giggly and feminine but, in the end, all it does is leave behind a faint smell, and I don't mean roses. To see what I consider "real" and moving historical fiction, that actually informs the reader about social history, click here.

Atonement (Ian McEwan)

2006-04-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I would call this novel the "compelling fictional landscape" that the cover comments claimed it would be. It was an interesting story for two reasons:

1. The setting of WWII, which is always quite gripping given that our country is obsessed with the heroism of the "last great war," which still appears so much more noble than the terroristic or diplomatic character of today's conflicts. There was good and bad, there were lines in the sand.

2. The ending laid quite a twist on the rest of the story, which made the reader have an Ah-Ha moment, where they run over the story again in the their head to take in the new context and therefore the new shades of meaning, putting the whole tale into a softer focus.

A good read, but not what I would call my favorite type of "literature." For Gnomey's definition of real "literature," click here. Funny how a story of atonement, one of the major universal themes of human expression, can be beat out by that of a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat, huh?

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

2006-04-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

I have read a lot of Hemingway. He is ubuiquitous in the literary world, some people think for little reason--what, with his simplistic style, betraying his "low" journalistic roots, with his party party storylines and characters. The man's personality, after all, has been captured so well in the modern mind. His drinking, manliness, ex-patriotism, adventuring, travelling, womanizing. I myself am guilty of this in calling my father's style of interior decorating very Hemingway. Well, the man has zebra-striped dining chairs for god's sake! In all that personality and the hype surrounding his works, I don't think a lot fo people take the time to sit down and read Hemingway. Just read the words and discover their worth for themselves, wiping the whiskey and zebra stripes out of their mind's eye to do it.

This, I believe, is the ideal Hemingway work to practice this theory. His first novel-length piece, it tells the story of a journalist living in Paris after World War I, a journalist with a mysterious un-named wound to which our only clue is that he can no longer, ahem, function as a man. He and his group of ex-pat friends travel to Spain to fish and watch the bull fights, as well as drink themselves silly. Easy to summarize, yet hard to truly express the essence of it. The themes are like the deep currents of a river, the river itself being simple yet the currents underneath are always playing on the sun-sparkled surface, reminding you of the chilly power underneath.

The perfect instance of this is in the main character's relationship with his lady love, a British aristocrat by the name of Brett. She's a loose and easy type, strikingly beautiful but ready to live life to the fullest now that the horror of war had shown how dear and fragile it can be. Though their conversations together are simple and appear breezy, I almost want to cring with the unfulfilled emotional undercurrent:

"Don't talk like a fool," I said. "Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it."

"Oh, no. I'll lay you don't."

"Well, let's shut up about it."

"I laughed about it too, myself, once." She wasn't looking at me. "A friend of my brother's came home that way from Mons. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?"

"No," I said. "Nobody ever knows anything....

"It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love."

"Do you think so?" her eyes looked flat again.

"I don't mean fun that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling."

"No," she said. "I think it's hell on earth."

"It's good to see each other."

"No. I don't think it is."

"Don't you want to?"

"I have to."

Excellent style, exotic storyline, and great depth. A three punch-er in my book. If you keep hearing about that Hemingway guy, that drinking author who lived in Cuba, that Kilamanjaro bloke your English teacher keeps pushing down your throat... give The Sun Also Rises a try. If it effects you similarly to me, well the, Ole! If not, you poor literature-loathing college student, it's always great as a drinking game. Simply count and take a shot every time a character says, "Let's have drink!" Looks like the first instance is on page 10.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

2006-04-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift

I have no idea how to begin describing this book. Perhaps that is why is has been finished for nine days now and I have yet to review it, letting 1.5 books accumulate behind it in the queue. I think I must begin with a few simple words to get the ball rolling: irreverent, witty, grotesque, farcical, erudite. I would compare it to a book of Thomas Aquinas and a MAD magazine, both left under a boy's bed to grow mold and develop patches of stickiness until they gel into one unit of random, insightful and tragi-comic ramblings.

These ramblings are the work of a character named Ignatius Rielly. An over-educated and under-motived slob and medievalist. A slave to the workings of his "valve" and the food that bloats him up to monumental proportions. Lazy, badly dressed and arrogant, Ignatius lists through life, living in his mothers house, living to yell obscenities at daytime television. That is, until he is almost arrested for appearing "suspicious," which stresses his mother, who drags them into a dive on Bourbon Street, where they get quite drunk and offend the establishment, after which his mother drives drunk into a stranger's house, that causes a little problem with the money for reparations, which makes Ignatius venture forth into the workplace and attempt to change the world. All in the first few pages, of course.

The rest is about this interaction between the world of Ignatius and the world reality. I think we begin to love Ignatius, repulsive as he is, for how he doesn't fit in, doesn't want to fit in, and blindly plows through his oddball antics with true courage--that is, the courage to not give a damn whether your world makes sense to anyone else or not. Incredibly funny and often very incisive, Confederacy of Dunces should be standard reading for every high school in America. Would definitely be a jumping off point for further literary ventures. I think this book could bridge the gap for non-bookies, proving to them that literature, even "classic" literature, can be more entertaining than sex. Okay, not sex. Television, though? I hope?

The innate tragedy of the novel, however, is the story of it's author, John Kennedy Toole. This novel was published 11 years after he committed suicide, partially because of his failure as a writer and partially because he was a writer (you know how moody we can be, right?). It was his mother and a professor she recruited that lobbied for the book's publication in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, obviously, in 1981. I suppose that knowing this information in advance, the novel reads out some of Toole's angst against a society that doesn't recognise genius and yet, simultaneous, pokes fun at the oddity, grotesque quality, and stupidity of that genius.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Steamstress (Dai Sijie)

2006-04-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

I picked this book up used at the library for $.75, mostly because the cover design and title attracted me. Intriguing and colorful yet simple, short enough to take on vacation. Turns out that most of my observations about the exterior held true for the inside. Sijie writes clean fiction, with brilliantly done subtext and tone, that speeds the pages along a simple, everyday storyline that is still artistic, poignant and... good. Yes, good. Very good.

This book is the tale of two Chinese boys, city boys of well-educated parents, parents who became "class enemies" during the Cultural Revolution. These two best friends are sent deep into China's countryside for their rural, prolitariat "re-education." It is, of course, mostly a coming of age story--love, naivite, and how to fit in the big, bad world. But what I love is the historical context. Now this is how you do historical fiction! The tale is technically and truly about universal themes but every aspect of these boys lives is regulated by the time period and geography that they inhabit. Chinese Communism effects every turn--their relationship to the rural locals, their distance and precarious relationship to their parents, and the education they do receive during this re-education, mainly through illicit books by Western authors. Books that expand their minds to distant places and dangerous points of view.

Yes, I really liked this book on all the fronts that I judge literature--great tale, excellent writing style, and ideas that will stick with me, that will grow and radiate through my brain through my life. It taught me so much about how that era felt, what it meant, and made these two little boys bright, real characters that walk straight off the page.

Smilla's Sense of Snow (Peter Hoeg)

2006-04-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

I had heard of this movie. It was an indie flick quite a few years ago that I always meant to see yet didn't. After reading the book, I'm rather glad as it seems the plot would never fit neatly into movie form without losing a great deal of complexity. Don't get me wrong, I will see it now. I'm just glad I had the experience of this very engrossing novel beforehand.

A novel about Smilla Jasperson, a Greenlandic native living in Denmark, a scientist by education, an excellent dresser, an introvert to the extreme, a woman caught between her youth and her present in the colonizing power who took over her homeland, a woman obsessed and I mean obsessed by ice and snow. Smilla's neighbor is a little boy who is also Greenlandic, with a drunk for a mother and a horrible end--dying by falling off a roof. Though his footprints in the snow show he was alone, Smilla senses foul play and this "sense of snow" leads her on an engrossing chase with all the frills. Conspiracies, explosions, fist fights, ice expeditions, sex, viruses, riches, autopsies...

You get the point. It's a thriller and a mystery, which usually isn't my style. It is, however, very well done for it's genre. Hoeg gets inside this very cold character of Smilla, isolated, intelligent, who sees the world and relationships in terms of winter, ice, fog, snow. Crystalization, temperatures, geometry. A thriller told by character sketch. A character that can walk on water (well, on the fragile ice that drifts on the surface but, hey, still cool). I don't know if I find the ultimate conclusion satisfying. As in all mysteries, this conclusion is supposed to answer all the questions of the rest of the book, retroactively explaining every event before. It seemed a bit implausible, or maybe the word is far fetched, the big giant conspiracy leading up to.... you'll see. And if you got sucked in like I did, beware the Dyson vacuum cleaner of Smilla!, you will definitely enjoy the ride.

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

2006-04-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr [the main character's room mate] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

This classic tragi-comedy by Joseph Heller epitomizes the oxymoronic nature of military intelligence and the violent meaninglessness of war to the poor, vulnerable soldier on the ground. The ones who have to face their own death every day for intangible ideals that have nothing to do with their lives, their blood. Soldiers like Yossarian, who appears naked to roll call so as not to have to accept a medal (because there was no where to pin it on, see?). Orr, who has apple cheeks from the crab apples he like to keep inside of them. Major Major, who his officers can only see if he's out--if he's in, they will have to wait until he goes out and then leave again when he returns.

Or Dunbar, who lives his life based on the principle that anything boring makes time go slower and therefore makes your life longer, or seem longer:

"You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older could you be at your age? A half a minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

"Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"

"I do," Dunbar told him.

"Why?" Clevinger asked.

"What else is there?"

I tried to watch the movie based on this novel a while ago and failed. It simply didn't compare to the deft word play and tricks with time that Heller pulls off in writing. This is one classic that is a breeze to read and will have you laughing out loud, hopefully not on an airplane as I was during this last re-reading. People kinda look at you funny.

Rain of Gold (Victor Villasenor)

2006-03-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

One of the other teachers at work recommended this book to me. Her favorite book of all time, she said, and I can see why. It's the sweeping tale of two families, their experiences leaving turbulent Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and their adaptation to America. It is, in fact, the true story of the author's grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and it is a fascinating peek into Mejicano culture. Stories of gold mines, bootlegging, poverty, rape, religion, humor, honor, and love. What is a life well-lived? What makes a man a man? How do we keep God in our everyday miracles?

I personally like the character of Dona Margarita, the image of her in the outhouse every morning with a cigarette in one hand, whiskey-spiked coffee in the other, and the Bible across her lap. Yet her real-life religion, based in fact and human reality rather than spiritual idealism, rings true. God with humor, color, and a bit of earthy dirt. Her policy of honesty is a good example of this color. "God respects my honesty that I admit that I lie... He's the biggest liar in all the universe. Giving us a mind that knows all the questions but none of the answers! He won't hate you for lying or cheating or swearing if it helps you to survive. But, of course, you don't injure others." Her philosophy on marriage, children, and alcohol pepper the book with laughter and truth, keeping her family together through bad and good times and through the good and bad within themselves. As she says to her son, "Every time... the devil comes near, I swear, you'll hear from me. I'm the tick up your spiritual asshole for all eternity!"

A fun read for the bubbly bathtub or curled up like a cat in your favorite page-turning place, Rain of Gold would have been perfect to bring on the airplane, the train, the road for my upcoming trip to Europe but, well, I finished it already. Hm. Sad.

Honeymoon With My Brother (Franz Wisner)

2006-03-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

My father and step-mom happened upon a book signing at a local bookstore by the author of this book, Honeymoon with My Brother, Franz Wisner. And I am very glad that they picked me up a copy of this light, airy and well-written memoir. One of those Million Little "memoirs" that have been in the news of late? No. This is, in fact, Franz's true story of being left at the altar by his girlfriend/financee of ten years, quickly followed by a demotion at his 12-hour-a-day, life-obsessing job. Questioning everything he thought he stood for, who he is and why his life has rolled to a halt at this particular stumbling block, Franz decided to still go on the pre-paid Honeymoon to Costa Rica. With his brother as his "bride."

After two weeks of jungle-trekking, Imperial drinking, volcano watching, and brotherly love (Man, I loved Costa Rica!), the boys come home with the idea of a year-long vacation around the world. Now or never, they think, and why not? They're young and unattached. And, of course, they are of independent means. Not overly rich but, well, let's just say that Franz even paid the mortgage on his 1/2 a million dollar house while they were out of town. A house that for the additonal second year of the trip, he did sell. In those two years on the road, they visited 53 countries on five continents (Australia and the Artic are still on the To Do list). Though they do have some cash to throw around, that doesn't mean that their travels were ultra-plush. In fact, they share many money-saving ideas along their life-changing, perspective-altering and self-finding trek. Wisner's observations and travel saavy are very fun, even if they make you want to simultaneously hug him for his adventure and hit him in jealousy that you are not there yet yourself. Observations like:

How to get Saab to pay for you to fly to Europe
Where to get a sand-floored hut on the beach for $4 a night (double occupancy)
Visible signs that a country's government is corrupt
Why to ditch that Lonely Planet guidebook
What hand signals are considered raunchy in Brazil
Football (soccer) facts and fans from around the world

Honeymoon is a highly entertaining read that makes you want to quit your job, give away your cat and sail away into the world. Don't forget the sunscreen! I am a world traveller myself, setting off for Eastern Europe in less than a week now (Yay!) and also a writer (who would kill for the opportunity to write a book that would pay for all of those travels!). So I am very happy, then, that my dad and step-mom had it personally inscribed to me and The Boyfriend at the authorial meet-and-greet that they attended.

The Brothers Karamozov (Fyodor Dostoevky)

2006-03-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, so my classic reading spree has gone a skosh too far and I am over the deep end in pages over my head. That and it's not fun anymore. Unlike the Joyce attempt, this book was not obfuscated or as hard to follow as breadcrumbs at an aviary. No. Dostoevsky has a great, detailed story-telling style full of ripe, psychological dialog. It's just frickin long and I don't have the patience right now. Plus, it's due at the library and I'm only on page 246 of 720. I think Dostoevsky, much like a foreign language, must be part of a class' instruction. You'll never get through it on your own unless you buy the audio tapes.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence)

2006-03-04T14:58:00.000-08:00

You know, I am usually one that objects to the four letter word that starts with a C that describes female genitalia. Hell, I'll say it--Cunt. Yes, cunt is not my favorite word by far, mostly because of the bitchy, rather dirty connotation it has taken on. A cunt is not a thing you make love to--it is for pure fucking, one night stands, and for women that wouldn't let you get even close to theirs. Yet, Lady Chatterley's Lover has recast the word in my eyes. "Tha'art good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth... Fuck is only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot besides an animal, aren't ter? even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass." Ah, the subtleties of language one learns in literature. (Have you ever heard the penis called a 'cod?')

This novel is, yes, very sexually charged. It was banned for any sort of pubication in the United States, even by mail from Europe (the postmaster got involved to halt it). But it's literary merit brought it through to the public and brought the pubic delights of Lady Chatterley into daylight. If you are looking for a purely erotic novel, look elsewhere--something about pirates with Fabio on the cover will usually do, in my opinion. This story is mainly a tale of how industrialization, especially in England where the story is set, changes the nature of man. Sex is a huge part of this because, as men and women become mechanized, how do they define themselves as men and women? D.H. Lawrence believes that the self-worth that people had in the pre-industrial age is lost as they become cogs in an assembly line. In order to by happy and express themselves, then, they buy things. Money, money, money. So a bunch of sexless beings roam the planet, unable to truly love without shame.

I'm sure we can all agree when we look upon the general populace or the dating scene we see a lot of people that don't really qualify as "men." Modernized, shameful, gonadless men. So too with some women, who use sex to gain what they want and often don't crave it themselves, misleading their men and then shaming them for their own desires. Even after the sexual revoltion, do you think we have human sexuality quite right yet, quite wholly natural? Therefore when a man and a woman are able to truly love one another, in every way, it is truly a magical and rare thing.

I really enjoyed the ideas that Lawrence, shall we say, arouses in the novel. Ideas that I believe are still very apt for these times, when we often discuss the isolating effects of technology and the inhumanizing aspects of airbrushed models in magazines and television. Where, then, is the Mellors to awaken every lost, searching (but for what?) Lady Chatterley? Or, as these characters name their, hmmm, nether regions in the book: John Thomas and Lady Jane. Lady Jane? That's going to be my new analogy for the vagina. I think I still prefer that to the word cunt.

Ice Child (Elizabeth McGreggor) + The Blue Nowhere (Jeffrey Deaver)

2006-03-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I forgot to bring my book to work for two different days last week. Not a problem at any other job, I'm sure, but when you have a solid two hours of nap time, you need the intellectual stimulation in order to stop the mental metamorphosis into a Teletubbie. I think I would turn into LaLa. My choices, without my trusty book, were some girly or celeb magazines or a Reader's Digest volume of four novels, sandwiched into one book. That, obviously is what I chose and I wound up reading two of the four. Guess I needed a little fluff with all that I have been reading lately--been bulking up on the classics that you often see on grad school reading lists. And fluff fluff fluffy they were.

The Ice Child plot synopsis:
Freelance journalist meets Antarctic explorer by covering the story of his disappearance during a historical expedition searching for the lost ships of an 18th century British mission that was looking for the Northwest passage. They fall in love and, dumping his wife who he has not lived with in years and over the objections of his son, plan to be married. On the day of the wedding, the son argues with the father due to pent up feelings of neglect and of loving the Artic and a lost, dead Brit more than his son. The son pushes the father, who loses balance, gets hit by a car and dies. The journalist is, of course, pregnant. The son, feeling responsible, runs away to the Artic to finish his father's quest and is declared missing. The journalist has the child who turns out to have a rare immune disease that can only be cured with a bone marrow transplant from his missing half-brother... I think you get the point. Oh, and don't forget the interspersed sections told from the point of view of the British explorers and a momma polar bear. Woo hee.

Plot synopsis of The Blue Nowhere:
A serial killer is loose, finding victims through the internet. He "socially engineers" them--finds out little details that can be used to turn himself into someone that can get close. The computer crimes unit enlists the help of an imprisoned hacker to track him down. Full of mostly correct computer jargon and some overly godlike viruses that "seize root" at every opportunity, prepare yourself to be whacked over the head with clues that will (obviously) become important to the twists of the story.

Okay. I'm back to Lady Chatterley's Lover now and am much much happier though also more well-informed should I ever choose to write a soap opera.

The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)

2006-02-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

Short novel. Short sentences. Short words with few syllables. Such is the work of Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea is no exception. I like how fluid Hemingway is to read and I realize that this is one of his most famous works. In fact, it's the piece that won him his Pulitzer Prize in 1953. But I personally don't think it is one of his strongest books. The Sun Also Rises is the one that struck me the hardest. It was a book that delved a bit deeper into humanity, I believe, than this story.

Ah, yes, I should probably tell you about the story. This is the tale of an aging Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, who hasn't caught a fish in more than 80 days. His apprentice forced to leave him for greener pastures, he is alone on the sea when he encounters and battles the largest Marlin he has ever seen. The finest points lie in the relationship between humans and nature, man and fish. Who has the right to kill who, who literally is killing who. And where is the meaning in a life so close to completion. This story is also a testament for Hemingway's time in Cuba, where he lived out the end of his life. Weighing in at about 130 pages, it's a nice weekend read or a good introduction to Hemingway for the novice.

Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich)

2006-02-24T19:37:00.000-08:00

This novel is less a novel than a series of interconnected short stories. Each segment told by a different character in the same environment--a Native American reservation of the Chippewa in the northern Midwest. It deals with two families primarily, the Kapshaws and the Lamartines, which drift apart from, hate, love, and reproduce with eachother.

You know why I like this book?

One: The postmodern connection of the point-of-view. A story with no set beginning or end. Without a character arch in the traditional sense of the phrase. Yet, these people, separately and together, create a kind of sense, a message that perhaps the people involved were unable to see as they were too close, a whole fabric weaved of the colored threads of the many, that alone only are pretty strings, sitting unused and sad on a table, with no purpose. But woven together, a tapestry. I love when authors take account of what truly makes up a story, a whole life, a whole landscape, a whole century. Whatever encompasses the story, instead of the old and typical David Copperfield trick of the incidents between "I was born" and "I died."

Two: The amount I learned about current Native American culture. Not the theoretical, not the spiritual, not the myths and legend of the textbook or the herbal remedies of the holistic. No, the way that life has continued to evolve for the Indians in America. Their habits, jobs, lives, families. Anything to see the dissimilarities and the intrisic sameness of human life in general.

Three: The time spent discussing alcohol and alcoholism amongst the Indians. I know that this partially comes from such roots in my past and the reasearch I have done in response. But Erdrich's novel describes alcholism as a disease, not a weakness, and a disease that affects families, or anyone that loves. If you are unaware of the connection of alcohol and genetics, the basic synopsis is that the body's cells will like to use alcohol as fuel over carbs, fats, or protein because it is easy to break down and provides instant, though not lasting, energy. In some people (who easily become alcoholics), the cells crave only this energy, which results in a physical need. Native Americans seems to be particulary vulnerable to this as their genes have yet/had yet to acquire the necessary tools to fight the effects of alcohol. Much like smallpox or other illnesses that ravaged their population, they were unable to fight it off. Though Erdrich doesn't go into the science of it, like I have, the battle of many of the characters with alcohol makes the disease human, understandable, and still heartbreakingly sad.

This is a wonderful modern read, especially for those interested in other cultures. Portions of the book have been excerpted in "Best Of" collections I read in college and published in many literary magazines. It's a deep yet very readable novel. Literary fiction to the center and non-traditional enough in structure that we say "Center? What center?" A novel I wished continued. Though I am told that the author does go on, I don't know if with the same characters, in later works.

Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

2006-02-21T18:49:00.000-08:00

Ah, Holden. How nice to meet up with you again. It's always an eye-opener to become reacquainted with you, with adolescence, with my teenage self, with the part of all of us that will never grow up and wants to curse at the "goddamn" world. Who wants to break all the windows and smoke all the cigarettes and watch the kids go 'round and 'round on the carousel. I find something new whenever I return to Holden. This time it is the repetition that strikes me. How Salinger crafts these redundant thoughts with such purpose. The technique makes Holden's voice both smart and young--he is struggling to find the words to elaborate on a thought but comes up dry. So he then repeats himself and asks the reader to make the leap he is too inarticulate to pin down exactly, sometimes with a direct question to the audience. Plus, all the slang that is heavy with meaning--"That kills me," "That knocks me out," "It's kinda funny," "all those phonies." And here it is from Holden himself:

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.

Well, in a way I hope there is a day when I don't relate to Holden. When I have a plan and don't feel like the weight of my purpose (What's your purpose? What do you want to be? Why can't you apply yourself?) like an anvil tied to the cuff of my pants. When I don't feel like just taking off into the distance with a single suitcase and hitch a ride into transparency. Here's a good plan. "Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know anybody. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend to be one of those deaf-mutes. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it down on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."

Such a pleasure to reread a good book. And, well, I need to get to library.

Broken For You (Stephanie Kallos)

2006-02-11T18:26:00.000-08:00

I got this book from a book club selection, the Today Show Book Club to be exact. This book club has an interesting notion--to have well-known authors chose selections of lesser known authors that they like. In fact, this was selected by Sur Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees. This selection, however, was simply okay. I think I could use this novel as the perfect example of a book--a good plot-driven book--vs. a book of literary fiction. It had a good story--an old woman, tortured by the guilt of her fortune's roots, finally overcomes her self-hatred to reach out to a colorful cast of characters late in her life, discovering how breaking an object (or a habit, an idea, etc) can be cathartic, how sometimes a broken thing is worth more than a whole one. I like that thought, that driving theme. I didn't like the flat characters. You knew which other flat character they were going to end up falling madly in love and living happily ever after with. You knew that so and so was really going to wind up being so and so's long lost family member. You knew that she would eventually figure out that the man she thought she loved and would never stop loving wasn't really worth it in the first place. And, you sighed when the subjects of Yoga, vegetarian diet, and brain tumors came up. I must say the best thing, in my opinion, was the discussion of bowling. Now there is unsussed territory. Hmmm. I'll have to remember that one. Anyway, a quick and light read about throwing precious, antique ceramics against the wall and relishing the noise, the mess, the destruction. And not so bad that you will throw the book itself across the room in imitation.

A Home at the End of the World (Michael Cunningham)

2006-02-11T18:18:00.000-08:00

I was disappointed in this, Michael Cunningham's first novel, before his Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours. I suppose I just like The Hours too much. I idolize it, worship it. I love the interaction between the three characters and the thread of Virginia Woolf running throughout. It was play, it was fun, it was a game of marbles with characters and (lyrical) descriptions but with depth in every action, in every clack of those marbles. In fact, I never saw the movie version, no matter who and their mother tells me how good it is, because I don't want to ruin my own idea of the novel, a fragile little bubble in my head that dazzles me with it's soapy, shining reflection of light. I'd like to keep it exactly as is.

This novel, on the other hand, is not bad by any means. It's interesting but dull, done and done again. The story of three people (and one of their mother's too but in an offhand, on and off way) who make their own sort of dusfunctional family. A gay man, his female best friend, and the gay man's childhood buddy (who was his first lover but then become's the woman's). They have a child together and attempt to raise it as a threesome, rejecting traditional notions of family to create their own "Home at the End of the World." I know, I know, you've heard that somewhere before, right? How about when Jennifer Aniston did it in Object of My Affection or when Madonna gave it a try in The Next Best Thing? I mean, if you are going to go into territory that has been explored my such, ahem, geniuses, you at least need to riff off of what they did. Take what has been done and either make fun of or build off of it. No. This book just did the trite thing. Oh, and threw in the AIDS epidemic to boot. Yay! All in all, a fun read. But nothing like The Hours, not in the same league as The Hours, and obviously before Cunningham truly found his voice and style in The Hours. Next time I try his work, I will pick up his collection of interlaced short stories that he wrote post Pulitzer, Specimen Days.

Fear of Flying (Erica Jong)

2006-02-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

This book was scandalous, which of course made it incredibly popular, when it was published in 1974 (5 years before I was born). I can certainly see why with the incessant use of the word fuck and the four letter word for vagina, beginning with a C, that I hate to say. I am ashamed that I hate that word--seems liberal ole me should be perfectly hunky dory with that slang, but I find that it's the violent sound of the word as it is spoken that I loathe. That and the connotation of nastiness/vulgarity associated with it. But Jong is certainly not shy of it as the narrator is not shy of her own, hmm, C word.

The novel is the story of Isadora Wing, in Vienna with her psychiatrist (second) husband for a professional conference. She meets another man, who turns her on with every pore of his skin and makes her realize how safe and perhaps dead her marriage is. She then runs off on a mad jaunt to discover existentialism, free love, feminism, and her self. Now, in 2006, the plot and the conclusions the narrator draws at the end are rather pat. About the fallacy of needing a man to complete you. About living your life without apologies. But Jong's novel was still a good fun read and her prose style is sharp, witty, and, yes, vulgar. Here's a great example:

"We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with one man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called civilization and its discontents."

It is also a story about being a female writer--how the experience is taxing, daunting and often dishonest. She doesn't feel free to write about what she really thinks or feels in the beginning because her thoughts aren't what she is supposed to be feeling, according to the novels and poems by male authors, what they thought a woman would feel, think, how she would act. A slightly out of date theory, I think, but still apt in ways. I think writing, for males or females, is about courage to overcome this dishonesty. I like this summary:

"My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before."

Great airplane or beach reading, even for you blokes out there. After all, none of your friends are going to see you reading it there. Plus, there's loads of female lust and it says fuck.... a lot.

Beloved (Toni Morrison)

2006-02-02T19:03:00.000-08:00

This novel flows like water, the pages being a shuffling waterfall between your open hands. Or rubber bands. See, I read my books at the gym and in order for this one to stay open I had to use two rubber bands, one pressing pages to the front cover and one the back. I then merely have to slip a new page, carefully, out and place it under the other rubber band. Good motivator for me on the elliptical machine when the book is this good.

Sigh. I love Morrison. Her poetic style and use of detail, especially about characters. One detail that encapsulates that person more than paragraphs of explanation. I love the way she makes skipping from person to person and from past to present okay--it makes sense, aiding the story and easily followed. I love how she has the talent to make a character that should be reprehensible, for their actions or their position, sympathetic and brave. It's a three-punch combo in my opinion. Not everyone, I know, feels the same. I recently chatted with a friend, a very intelligent friend, who felt this novel was a long and arduous slog. "At least I know more about slavery," she said. But I suppose we are all attracted to story-telling styles that suit our own thought processes and Morrison conveys the way I think and see the world around me, in stops and starts and looping backs and retellings with vivid drops of color splattered about. Morrison could be writing inside of my head--except I'm not black, was never a slave, have never been a mother, have never lost a child, etc and etc.

Ah the story. The story centers on the character of Sethe, a former slave that escaped her master to settle in Ohio with her husband's mother, a husband that never showed up as planned. That could never be cataloged as still living or mercifully dead. Sethe is above all a mother of four--one home, two taken off, and one dead yet haunting the house with the red, sad anger of a two-year old soul taken too soon. Through the interactions with her remaining daughter, Denver, and a long lost blast-from-the-past friend, Paul D, Sethe revisits all the pain that made her who she is and that explains, if not condones, all she has done. Morrison will leave you with vivid descriptions after the covers close--a quilt with two orange squares of color, how blood can feel oily as it slides through your fingers, and the metaphor of Paul D's heart: a rusted over tobacco tin, better kept closed, because love is a danger. If you love something, make it a small thing, like sunshine or the shadow under a tree, because loving something big is giving the world leverage to break you in yet another way.

Ulysses (James Joyce)

2006-01-28T09:34:00.000-08:00

I am utterly ashamed. I hang my rose-blushed cheeks, my chin on chest. Beaten. Battered. Bashed in what I thought were my brains.

In other words, I cannot get through this. I have had it in my purse for five days an have finished 46 pages. Joyce has some brilliant language but, well, the stream of consciousness (SOC) is too much for me. I like SOC, I do. Have read it before and, yes, it is a struggle to get used to but, once you are inside of the author's world, it usually becomes easier. Not here. At least, not for me. Part of it is the use of outdated allusions, I think. To the Bible or Irish folk songs. In Latin, in Italian, French and other languages. Also, he skips between and within time without transition so the past and the present are both overlapping ghosts. And lastly, and most tangibly, the quotation punctuation is all screwy. For instance, Joyce writes a quote like this:

--Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current will you?

This is a basic example from the first page but it gets worse when the speaker's action, the actual words and the main character's thoughts get all together with no "quotes." I guess that little dash is not enough for my pea-sized brain to decode. I surrender, Joyce. I hope, I hope to pick this up again one day and find that it makes sense. That I can swim through it. Maybe I'm just too lazy right now or maybe I just need some sort of Rosetta Stone. Anyone got one for sale? Seen one up on E-bay? "The James Joyce Secret Society Decoder Ring."

No, no, excuse me.

--The James Joyce Secret Society Decoder Ring, she said. I wonder where I could find one?

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

2006-01-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

1200 pages. Let me write out the numbers to give the weight of that justice: Twelve Hundred pages, One Thousand and Two Hundred pages. If I bought another copy, I could use them to do bicep curls but, well, that's an expensive and not very durable (paperback) dumbell. And my one copy was already almost destroyed. I must say that Rand does keep a reader on a short leash through that Grand Canyon of a trek. The world she creates feels to me like like being inside an Art Deco/Avante Garde painting. Everything is speed, motion, smooth bright color, commerce, technology, man-made machines, all in aerodynamic lines celebrating man's glory, his capacity for glory, the glory of man's mind and man's spirit. If it is a painting, then, it is an overly symbolic one where each object or tone/color is of the utmost importance, a philosophic work that struggles to fit the art form to an entire life view like stretching a tapestry over a wood and metal frame. Yes, that metaphor is apt because sometimes the tapestry (the art of the novel) wears thin with the insistant poking of the philosophic framework from under the surface.

To outline the plot, you should meet the cast of characters, all of whom are perfect examples of Ubermenschen. They are not only incredibly intelligent (they carry on conversations that could never exist in the real world, even between Nobel Laureates) but also beautiful, their muscles carved of marble, their hair of silk, their expressive eyes of various gemstones. I'm exaggerating here but only slightly--I was a bit frustrated and, okay, attracted by this. I mean, how do some of them stay so gorgeous when they are described as doing nothing but sitting in an office to over-work for 12 hours days? Recipe for obesity if you ask me. But I digress. This cast of sexy supermen and women is pitted against the world at large, a world that wants to only get by, take what it can and work what it has to. I think that Rand taps into any reader's feeling on this point. We all have been in a situation where we feel that we are working harder and/or smarter than those around us yet our work is benefitting them just as much, if not more. Rand believes that modern society is made up of these intellectual and financial "looters" who rob the talented and the virtuous of their work to make the rest of un-talented and un-working society function. These superpeople are Atlas, holding the world on their shoulders because they have been brought up to believe it is their moral responsibility. But what would happen if Atlas Shrugged?

The back cover describes the novel as "part action-adventure" and the plot about this struggle can be classified that way, though it is not frenetic enough for Bruce Willis to ever get involved in the film-version (which would be, what? 6-8 hours long?). The action is slowed, and rightly so I think, to insert the philosophic converations, thoughts, ephiphanies. I like how this gives real world examples to the theories, concrete expressions of her lofty ideas. It gets tiresome, however, during the 60 page speech by one of the main heroes that basically repeats all the theories that had been related already but with different metaphors. Rand tries to break it up for the eye by chunking the text into lots of paragraphs but nobody is being fooled. 60 pages. And this was the hardest part of the book for me--get on with it! She is going to fall in love with him, and that guy is going to find out the truth, and the bad guy is about to step into this trap and, twiddle dee dee, I need to read this 60 pages before the plot progresses!

Upon completion of my task, I can say that I liked the novel. I can see why it is considered a classic. I like the philosophy behind the novel, too, though I think parts of it are a bit dated. One can always strive to enact this world view in their personal life. In fact, I have often been thinking about it when reading or watching other stories, how her theory could relate to different character and circumstances. But economically, I don't know. I don't know if the free Capitalism she espouses would be wise or even feasible to enact. I think a lot of it stemmed from her own childhood experience with Communism and perhaps her ideas would have changed along with the rest of the world's post 1989. But business is not my forte so I shall stay out of it all together.

A fantastic read. I will agree with another friend, who warned me before starting Atlas Shrugged. He said, "I wanted to do nothing but read this book. I wanted to call in sick to work to read this book." And no, that's not exaggeration. Good thing that I get to read for 1-2 hours at work everyday, hmmm? Yay for nap time!!

The Kite Runner (Khaled Housseini)

2006-01-22T11:59:00.001-08:00

Housseini is a doctor by trade, who wrote a national best-seller his first time out of the gates (which makes me very envious and proud of him simultaneously). He's a good writer, more with plot than with fancy description but good. And a story set in Afghanistan, that relates some of the culture and history of the country in language that American's can understand, is a hot commodity in this day and age when we are all struggling to comprehend the events of the world around us.

This is the story of two boys, one rich and one poor, one master and one servant, one racially "superior" and one "inferior." The master, Ali, flies the kite in local competitions where each man must cut loose the kite of his rival with the glass-edged string of his own kite. The servant, Hasan, then runs to fetch the lost kites--the Kite Runner, you see--and has an uncanny knack for the task. "Anything for you," he says, with true devotion. But history and human weakness separates these life-long friends.

Remember the holocaust poem that you were made to read, silently and aloud, as homework and at assemblies, about speaking up? And when they came to take me, there was no one left to speak. This is a story about how a life can be lost, spiritually that is, by doing nothing at all. By letting something evil happen, you inherit that evil and carry it around for life, your own back-grinding load. But of course there is redemption. Come on, you knew there was going to be redemption, right?

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

2006-01-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

Second time reading this one. I have no money to buy books and I don't feel like going to the library. Plus, on occasion it's fun to read a book that you don't have to wade through for a day until you know whether it's good. Sometimes it is just nice to know.

An Indian boy named Piscine Patel, son of a zoo keeper and en route from India to Canada, is cast out to sea when his ship goes down. His only companion? A male, adult Bengal tiger. For 227 days, he survives. For exactly 100 chapters, you will not only survive but thrive with creative energy while considering the many issues that Martel raises--zoology, religion, human nature, endurance, balance. A story that excels in all areas--plot originality and movement, unique descriptive style, and themes that emerge as if from your own head, your experience, your skin. And, to me, that three-punch combo is rare and precious. The kind of novel that I would be proud to say I wrote but, because I know is so perfect, is and maybe always will be beyond me.

The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)

2006-01-22T11:58:00.002-08:00

Morrison's first novel, her Nobel-prize winning work about Pecola Breedlove, among other characters. Pecola wants nothing more than to have blue eyes, to fit the standard of beauty she sees in Shirley Temple and her own baby dolls. Why does a little girl not want a doll?, they ask. We pay good money for a plaything for her and she does nothing but destroy it, drag it by it's hair, rip out it's eyes. A powerful work that, of course, speaks to the heart of racism and African-American identity. But in a broader sense, Bluest Eye is about stepping outside of such standards to accept and celebrate the self. Morrison's descriptive talent can tell any story. My personal favorite is Jazz, worth checking out if you too are a fan.

The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)

2006-01-22T11:58:00.001-08:00

Tales of the dysfunctional family have been all the rage for the last few years. Yes, yes, I get it. We're all dysfunctional in our own little ways and usually, under the quirkiness and neruosis, you find the true emotions that lie underneath--love, family.... Not in this book. A very interesting and well-written story centering around a family whose matriarch just wants everyone back in suburban mid-West for one last Christmas together. The separate plotlines of the three children are all complex and intriguing as Franzen switches back and forth between his family of characters. When in one character's shoes, you see the horrid things the others do and what pain lies in the interior of the person you inhabit. But then it shifts and you can't help but think the character whose mind you were in before is utterly reprehensible. A quick read--it definitely sucks you in, your nose in the crease of the spine--but on the whole unfufilling to me for one reason. In the end, I could not relate to any of these creatures that passed themselves off as human beings. I pitied them. I felt the interest of a scientist looking at a new species under the microscope. But they were nasty, mean people and I didn't identify with them at all. I believe that may be a main theme of the book but, personally, I am thankful that the people Franzen sculpts exist only within those pages, which I can easily close, leaving them caged between front and back cover, safe on the shelf.

The Winter of Our Discontent (John Steinbeck)

2006-01-22T11:58:00.000-08:00

Winter of Our Discontent, meaning either:
1) That season when we were so discontented.
2) The end of the era of our discontent, quickly to be renewed with a spring of happiness

Who knows. I think that Steinbeck purposefully wants his reader to ponder that notion when reading about Ethan Hawley, a man of prestigious descent but with the humble job of shopkeeper and a family who craves more. If success is monetary and success is "good," then why are Ethan's "good" deeds not bringing him prosperity? Shouldn't he then do the "bad" things to be the "good" guy? A story for anyone who enjoys pondering such questions, such questions where it is not the answer that is important but only the asking. A story for anyone who wondered what it would be like, just how would it feel, how would it be accomplished, to rob a bank. Shhh. Don't give it away now.

We The Living (Ayn Rand)

2006-01-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

Ayn Rand's first novel and a cathartic, semi-autobiographical tale of life in Communist Russia. It's amazing to think that English is not her first language when you read this gritty prose, prose that brings the bitter cold of winter felt through ragged clothes right up to your nose. The plotline reads like a Romance--a woman caught in a triangle with two men, different in every way. One representing the free soul, being torn apart by a dictatorship, and the other the man who represents that government in an idealistic (perhaps ignorant) way, full of the idealism of Marx. Political and philosophical, Rand begins to explain her life's philosophy of Objectivism and, I think, reveals from where this theory emerged--growing up in such a brutally cold environment--cold unheated flats, cold to the arts and sciences, cold to the individual spirit. I swear, I had to put on an extra pair of socks during this one and couldn't stop thinking of those Primus stoves. A Primus for every family as the only means of cooking. Funny to think that I own a Primus, for camping of couse, of how an object can transcend geography and time, how a stove can mentally link my backpacking adventures and the meatless tacos I cook to the struggle for survival (and spiritual death) in the Communist Russia of the last century.

Civilwarland In Bad Decline (George Saunders)

2006-01-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

Second time reading this collection of short stories and am just as impressed. The title story is the jewel of the whole, I think, and is the tale of the second-in-command at a local amusement park/tourist attraction. Which has come under attack by local gangs. Darkly funny without losing any dramatic impact. A modern Southern writer of talent.