Really? That's what all this fuss is about?? Sparkly bear-sucking vampires? Seriously? I'm stunned. I mean, it wasn't a BAD read. But Harry Potter it ain't, folks. I'd put that in all caps if it weren't super-abnoxious to do so. But it bears (no pun intended) repeating: Harry Potter it ain't.
I've read JK Rowling, and you, Stephanie Meyer, are no JK Rowling.
I'm kind of bummed, to be honest. Some of my favorite students are loyal Twilighters. But, freak though she is, I'll take Anne Rice and her Lestat (et al) over Meyer and her Cullens any day.
What impresses me most, though, is that these voracious teens kept reading. Some of TWILIGHT is seriously, swamp-slogging slow.
I zoomed through the book in an effort to finish it before the movie came out, and I would have made it had there not been these scenes that totally stalled out. (Another scene in bio class? Another scene in the lunch room? Oh Lordy, who ever thought teen drama could be so undramatic!?) But with the current reviews of the movie, I don't think I'll bother. First of all, the book didn't grab me. Secondly, have you seen the lead actor's eyebrows? Not what I'd call hot stuff-- I give him twenty more years before he starts to look like Robin Williams. And apparently the actress who plays Bella is even more sullen than the actual character of Bella, who is already intolerably sullen.
Will I read the other two books? Probably, in due time. I have a hard time putting down books in a series. And I have to give credit to any book that gets kids (or keeps kids) reading. But I understood Harry Potter. I adored Harry Potter. I will defend Harry Potter and the quality of Rowling's work to the end. The HP series was about so much more than just a teen wizard. I admire the Meyer story and I admire the effect she's had on teens. But I don't admire her work, thus far. TWILIGHT, however, doesn't seem much more than just a Harlequin Romance for teens.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
CATEGORY FIVE by TJ MacGregor
I can't tell you how frustrating it has been to take SO long to read a book. This speaks only to my current health/stress and not at all to the quality of Category Five.
This book was published in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, and it is so prescient that at times it made this Katrina survivor's knees get weak. I am also a closet conspiracy theorist, or at least a woman who is more than willing to give her ear to conspiracy theorists, and this book fed my concerns about FEMA, about our country's natural disaster response, and about our level of preparedness for disasters both man-made and natural.
I picked up this book for a number of reasons. I met MacGregor in 2002 and thought she was the bees' knees. I found it at a used book store for a couple of bucks. And when I read the back cover, I realized that it addressed a Cat5 hurricane in a marginally pre-Katrina world.
I didn't realize when I bought it that it was the 4th book in a series featuring Mira Morales, a psychic on Tango Key in Florida. But, though I normally hate picking up book so late in a series, MacGregor did enough to fill me in that I felt very comfortable with all of the characers and all of the situations. In fact, MacGregor has a book called Black Water that I feel like I could skip seeing that the central conflictof that book comes up repeatedly in this one.
All of the characters in this book are so well-drawn, from the series staples of Mira and Shepard and Annie and Nadine, to the newcomers of Tia and Crystal and Franklin. I feel safe hearing the story through the minds of any of these characters and MacGregor does an excellent job balancing the narration between these folks.
More than anything else, this book made me want to spend some time really looking into what happened during Hurricane Andrew in S. Florida. And I appreciate this call to arms. Katrina, I think, has been analyzed to death, but was Andrew so scrutinized?
This book was published in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, and it is so prescient that at times it made this Katrina survivor's knees get weak. I am also a closet conspiracy theorist, or at least a woman who is more than willing to give her ear to conspiracy theorists, and this book fed my concerns about FEMA, about our country's natural disaster response, and about our level of preparedness for disasters both man-made and natural.
I picked up this book for a number of reasons. I met MacGregor in 2002 and thought she was the bees' knees. I found it at a used book store for a couple of bucks. And when I read the back cover, I realized that it addressed a Cat5 hurricane in a marginally pre-Katrina world.
I didn't realize when I bought it that it was the 4th book in a series featuring Mira Morales, a psychic on Tango Key in Florida. But, though I normally hate picking up book so late in a series, MacGregor did enough to fill me in that I felt very comfortable with all of the characers and all of the situations. In fact, MacGregor has a book called Black Water that I feel like I could skip seeing that the central conflictof that book comes up repeatedly in this one.
All of the characters in this book are so well-drawn, from the series staples of Mira and Shepard and Annie and Nadine, to the newcomers of Tia and Crystal and Franklin. I feel safe hearing the story through the minds of any of these characters and MacGregor does an excellent job balancing the narration between these folks.
More than anything else, this book made me want to spend some time really looking into what happened during Hurricane Andrew in S. Florida. And I appreciate this call to arms. Katrina, I think, has been analyzed to death, but was Andrew so scrutinized?
Monday, October 13, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
THE MOOR by Laurie R. King
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes return to the site of his most famous case-- the moors surrounding Baskerville Hall-- for another crack at a ghostly hound and case buoyed by the folklore and superstitions of the people of the moors.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
NATURE GIRL by Carl Hiaasen
I'm a huge Carl Hiassen fan; I've read almost every novel he's ever written. But this book was a slog. I found myself skipping paragraphs, skimming pages. It just seemed tired and old Hiaasen stuff. There was no character to latch onto-- all of them seemed stretched like Silly Putty beyond belief. I couldn't wait to be done with it so I could take up the next Laurie R. King book. But, as usual, I am loathe to abandon books.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE by Laurie R. King
There are few things better than liking a book and a character so much that it borders on obsession. Ever since my cousin loaned me THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE, I've had dreams about Mary Russell and her world. And now that I've spent a little bit of time on Laurie R. King's website and read a little of her blog, I'm discovering that the author is as totally charming as her creation.The Mary Russell novels are set in Post WWI England. A troubled teenaged orphan literally trips over a man while strolling in the countryside, her nose buried in a book. The man, it turns out, is the very real and semi-retired Sherlock Holmes, who, well into middle age, has become a pop culture myth in his own time created by (and in his opinion much maligned by) the too liberal pen of Arthur Conan Doyle. This chance meeting becomes the apprenticeship in the title, and eventually a partnership and eventually more.
I have always had a deep love for Holmes, whether in the books or on television. My love for Nancy Drew immediately led me to Holmes who led me to Agatha Christie and a subsequent passion for the classic detective novel in general-- the dusty, library detectives specifically. And King's Holmes is a masterpiece in his faded and sometimes ridiculous brilliance. He's a genius but emotionally stunted. He's callous and cold but also wounded and vulnerable. But he's got this sexy, Indiana Jones at 60-ish thing going on too.
But of course, it is Russell who becomes the iconic figure through King's series (I'm on Book 3). She ranks right up there with the Great Women of Fiction, in my opinion. I used to want to be Jane Eyre when I grew up, now I want to be Mary Russell (yes, I recognize that I am more than a decade older than either of these women at their literary height).
Russell is exceptionally smart and is an equal to Holmes almost immediately. But where he is coarse, she is gentle and emotionally intelligent. She, too, is wounded, but she is not scarred over (well, yes she is, physically). She's the tomboy, preferring her father's clothes to her own (for sentimental reasons as well) and the independent woman of the age of sufferage, even as a girl. She is a wit. And let's face it, the cover image on every book of the series paints her as sexy as hell.
King's writing is exceptionally rich and engaging, and perhaps most impressive is her brilliant command of the time period-- not just the history, but the social sentiment, the attitudes, the mores-- you feel as though you are in the hands of not just a fantastic writer, but a scholar. In addition, King brings her background in theology to bear through Russell's studies at Oxford.
Yes, I gush. But really, this is what you dream of (or at least I do) when you think about summer reading-- something that reads like a dream and leaves you smarter... and dreaming.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
CANCER VIXEN by Marisa Acocella Marchetto
Graphic novel. Sex in the City meets breast cancer minus Samantha's pink hair.
GREAT WHITE by Peter Benchley
Not really about a shark...
But about my hometown in Connecticut under a different name.
But about my hometown in Connecticut under a different name.
DEEP SIX by Randy Striker (Randy Wayne White)
Re-published early thriller/mystery from South Florida's Randy Wayne White writing under the pseudonym Striker.
Lou's going to cheat: Book Dump
Lou has been reading. Yes, she has.
But she hasn't been blogging.
So, I'm going to clear the plate and create entries for the books that I've read but not blogged and then-- ideally-- go back and edit and fill them in.
Stand by for book-dump.
But she hasn't been blogging.
So, I'm going to clear the plate and create entries for the books that I've read but not blogged and then-- ideally-- go back and edit and fill them in.
Stand by for book-dump.
THE NAME OF THE WIND by Patrick Rothfuss
WIND represents the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicle, a trilogy in the purest sense of the word. I don’t know whether it’s the marketplace (“I have to wrap up the story of Book One because who knows if Book Two will be bought”) or just modern convention, but trilogies—even series: Harry Potter?— these days have more in common with stand-alone books than they do with their serial ancestors. But THE NAME OF THE WIND is truly a “first of three”—and as a modern reader, used to the stand-alone-ish books in a series—I couldn’t help but be frustrated.
First of all, WIND (and one can’t help but assume the entire series) is an astonishing achievement: seven hundred-plus pages of extraordinarily rich and dense fiction in the most classic fantasy style. It’s the story (oral autobiography, really) of Kvothe, the unremarkable tavern keeper, who is truly his land’s greatest hero (and sometimes anti-hero) hiding in plain sight under a false identity. When his story (which he tells for posterity to the Chronicler—Book 1 representing Day 1 of the storytelling) begins, Kvothe is living a bucolic and charmed childhood, the son of traveling players, and the apprentice to an arcanist (wizard?). His path is altered by tragedy and eventually reconstructed as a quest for revenge.
The book’s plotting is remarkable (even more so because one assumes Rothfuss is keeping many of his balls in the air until the end of the series—his website tells us that he’s “finished” Kvothe’s story, if not perfected it). Many of the minor characters are well drawn and “alive” and interesting (Bast and Auri come to mind). And frankly, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a book so “well-blurbed”—anybody who’s anybody in classic fantasy has labeled Rothfuss the Next Big Thing.
Maybe I’m just a tough sell these days. But as I read this book, it made me truly understand one of the many reasons that the Harry Potter series is truly worth every bit of love and honor that has been heaped upon it. Simply put, Harry is a real kid. Everyone, even baddies like Malfoy and Snape and Voldemort, is real. My chief complaint about WIND was my chief complaint about the MAXIMUM RIDE books. Rothfuss creates a young/teenaged Kvothe that’s as savvy, sexy, sophisticated, and smooth-talking as—well, as a ridiculously savvy, sexy, sophisticated, and smooth-talking twenty something. I don’t care if “living on the streets” is supposed to make you old beyond your years, Kvothe woos with spontaneous poetry and makes difficult choices unclouded by the fog of youth. He suffers existentially but not with the usual teenaged confusion. As I said, the plotting is excellent, and the young Kvothe’s story is appropriately messy and flawed and full of bad choices, but the character of young Kvothe processes these challenges with the sophistication of an adult with a PhD in philosophy.
Rothfuss dips his toes into post-modern meta-fiction at times, both with the multiple levels of narration and fluidity of time and with instances of self-reference. At times this is precious and clever, but at times it read as an ass-saving mood. Just when you think Kvothe’s biography is delving into long held fantasy clichés, Rothfuss-as-Kvothe interjects and says something along the lines of “I know what you expect now—young runaway finds wizened old mentor who teaches him everything he knows and then dies a shocking death—but that’s not exactly what happened.” And sure, it’s not exactly what happened, but it’s kind of what happened. No amount of winky self-awareness can dull the edge of WIND as a veritable buffet of conventional-fantasy events. Here’s the one where he fights the dragon. Here’s the one where the woman with the beautiful voice turns out to be the woman he’s had a crush on. Here’s the one where his rival destroys the one thing he’s sentimental about. Here’s the one where the crazy sage turns out to be the wisest one.
There is no doubt in my mind that this book is worthy of much of the hype when it comes to sheer accomplishment. I just can’t understand the abundance of dwarf-adults that populate fiction for or about children. It may be worth noting (as I noted in my review of the MAXIMUM RIDE books) that it appears that Patterson didn’t have a daughter and that Rothfuss doesn’t have children. As Kvothe grows, so does his humanity, and in the grand scheme of things (grand scheme = three epic-length books) my gripe may represent a drop in the bucket.
The fact that I was ticked off when I realized that I would have to wait til April 2009 for the next installment means I was more invested than I thought I was. I hope Rothfuss can maintain the momentum.
First of all, WIND (and one can’t help but assume the entire series) is an astonishing achievement: seven hundred-plus pages of extraordinarily rich and dense fiction in the most classic fantasy style. It’s the story (oral autobiography, really) of Kvothe, the unremarkable tavern keeper, who is truly his land’s greatest hero (and sometimes anti-hero) hiding in plain sight under a false identity. When his story (which he tells for posterity to the Chronicler—Book 1 representing Day 1 of the storytelling) begins, Kvothe is living a bucolic and charmed childhood, the son of traveling players, and the apprentice to an arcanist (wizard?). His path is altered by tragedy and eventually reconstructed as a quest for revenge.
The book’s plotting is remarkable (even more so because one assumes Rothfuss is keeping many of his balls in the air until the end of the series—his website tells us that he’s “finished” Kvothe’s story, if not perfected it). Many of the minor characters are well drawn and “alive” and interesting (Bast and Auri come to mind). And frankly, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a book so “well-blurbed”—anybody who’s anybody in classic fantasy has labeled Rothfuss the Next Big Thing.
Maybe I’m just a tough sell these days. But as I read this book, it made me truly understand one of the many reasons that the Harry Potter series is truly worth every bit of love and honor that has been heaped upon it. Simply put, Harry is a real kid. Everyone, even baddies like Malfoy and Snape and Voldemort, is real. My chief complaint about WIND was my chief complaint about the MAXIMUM RIDE books. Rothfuss creates a young/teenaged Kvothe that’s as savvy, sexy, sophisticated, and smooth-talking as—well, as a ridiculously savvy, sexy, sophisticated, and smooth-talking twenty something. I don’t care if “living on the streets” is supposed to make you old beyond your years, Kvothe woos with spontaneous poetry and makes difficult choices unclouded by the fog of youth. He suffers existentially but not with the usual teenaged confusion. As I said, the plotting is excellent, and the young Kvothe’s story is appropriately messy and flawed and full of bad choices, but the character of young Kvothe processes these challenges with the sophistication of an adult with a PhD in philosophy.
Rothfuss dips his toes into post-modern meta-fiction at times, both with the multiple levels of narration and fluidity of time and with instances of self-reference. At times this is precious and clever, but at times it read as an ass-saving mood. Just when you think Kvothe’s biography is delving into long held fantasy clichés, Rothfuss-as-Kvothe interjects and says something along the lines of “I know what you expect now—young runaway finds wizened old mentor who teaches him everything he knows and then dies a shocking death—but that’s not exactly what happened.” And sure, it’s not exactly what happened, but it’s kind of what happened. No amount of winky self-awareness can dull the edge of WIND as a veritable buffet of conventional-fantasy events. Here’s the one where he fights the dragon. Here’s the one where the woman with the beautiful voice turns out to be the woman he’s had a crush on. Here’s the one where his rival destroys the one thing he’s sentimental about. Here’s the one where the crazy sage turns out to be the wisest one.
There is no doubt in my mind that this book is worthy of much of the hype when it comes to sheer accomplishment. I just can’t understand the abundance of dwarf-adults that populate fiction for or about children. It may be worth noting (as I noted in my review of the MAXIMUM RIDE books) that it appears that Patterson didn’t have a daughter and that Rothfuss doesn’t have children. As Kvothe grows, so does his humanity, and in the grand scheme of things (grand scheme = three epic-length books) my gripe may represent a drop in the bucket.
The fact that I was ticked off when I realized that I would have to wait til April 2009 for the next installment means I was more invested than I thought I was. I hope Rothfuss can maintain the momentum.
Friday, July 25, 2008
BLANKETS by Craig Thompson
Another book recommended for my down time, this time recommended by a good friend and former colleague.
Gorgeously drawn and organized memoir in graphic novel form. BLANKETS chronicles a handful of poignant events over the course of Thompson's childhood and young adulthood. Some of the events are tender and help to define the sweeter relationships in Thompson's early years-- that with a brother with whom he shared both tragedy and blissful excapism and that with his first love, though it was a relationship seen through rose colored glasses. Some of the events are difficult to bear-- the brothers' abuse at the hands of their evangelical family, the unraveling of Thompson's relationship with Raina (even though it's inevitable).
Most beautifully drawn (literally and figuratively) is Thompson's internal and external struggle with his faith. Many scenes in which Thompson grapples with Christianity are drawn like stained glass windows and punctuated by scripture.
The book seemed an odd gift from this particular friend, at first, but as we both share an interest in the memoir form and of non-linear narration, as I continued to read, I began to understand. The 600 page graphic novel/memoir was a quick read. Two short nights.
Gorgeously drawn and organized memoir in graphic novel form. BLANKETS chronicles a handful of poignant events over the course of Thompson's childhood and young adulthood. Some of the events are tender and help to define the sweeter relationships in Thompson's early years-- that with a brother with whom he shared both tragedy and blissful excapism and that with his first love, though it was a relationship seen through rose colored glasses. Some of the events are difficult to bear-- the brothers' abuse at the hands of their evangelical family, the unraveling of Thompson's relationship with Raina (even though it's inevitable).
Most beautifully drawn (literally and figuratively) is Thompson's internal and external struggle with his faith. Many scenes in which Thompson grapples with Christianity are drawn like stained glass windows and punctuated by scripture.
The book seemed an odd gift from this particular friend, at first, but as we both share an interest in the memoir form and of non-linear narration, as I continued to read, I began to understand. The 600 page graphic novel/memoir was a quick read. Two short nights.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
MAXIMUM RIDE (series) by James Patterson (first three books of series)
When I got sick, I figured the best way that my kids could help me out was by lending me books. The only rule was that they had to include an index card inside the book to tell me why they thought I would enjoy the book.
Knowing that I enjoy the occasional fantasy/sci-fi, a student lent me THE ANGEL EXPERIMENT, SCHOOL'S OUT FOREVER, and SAVING THE WORLD AND OTHER EXTREME SPORTS, Young Adult novels by popular best-selling author James Patterson. There is one other book out in the series, another book to come, and a movie in the works. Also, there's a huge web presence for this series and its heroine, the 14 year old Maximum Ride, anchored by the epic and frequently updated blog belonging to Max's friend Fang and the rest of her "flock."
Honestly, YA books are always a tough sell for me, even when they're written by experienced authors and authors of books that I love. Both Michael Chabon (SUMMERLAND) and Carl Hiaasen (FLUSH and HOOT) have let me down even though they rank up there in my top ten living writers.
The Maximum Ride books are similarly thin. I say similarly because, in general, all of these writers share the same fatal flaw and that's that one has to wonder how much time they spend with actual young adults.
I devoured the three books in less than two days. They were zippy reads and the plot (baddies in the science world have created and abused a series of mutant human beings) was compelling albeit deeply lacking in originality: mutant hybrid children with special abilities often derived from animals living in a School with some adults wanting to "use" them for good and others wanting to "use" them for evil. Has Patterson never seen/read/been exposed to X-MEN and TEEN TITANS?? More importantly, does his editor not have truck with this enormous comic and film phenom?
Can James Patterson write anything (and poorly at that) and get it sold? Yes. Yes he can. And he can because every single one of these books hit #1 on the Times Best Seller List.
I just can't believe that teens aren't insulted by these books, or at the very least by the protagonist Max Ride. Other characters fare better; her friend/possible love interest Fang, for example, is more nuanced and charming. Even the talking dog is infinitely more lovable than Max. Max makes me wonder if Patterson likes teen girls or merely finds them snarky and sarcastic. Max acts far older than her 14 years and she can't let three lines pass without throwing in a bitchy zinger.
It's pretty telling that Patterson appears to only have a single child, a son named Jack. Max represents the worst of teenaged girls blown out to stereotype. She's selfish; albeit the "mother" to her "flock"-- Max mothers her flock because it feeds Max's own need to be needed. She's short-sighted. She's incredibly easily irritated and moody. She's finicky and her allegiences change with the breeze. I'm not a mom of a teen girl, but I taught teen girls exclusively for 5 years and taught teen girls and boys for three additional years-- and heck, I WAS a teen girl for seven years-- and I'm terribly put off by Max (and to a certain extent the other female characters Nudge and Angel).
I was also pretty shocked by the extreme level of violence in these books. There's a great deal of blood and smashed bones and wanton murder.
But yes, I read all three books. The student who loaned me the book is an excellent kid. I just hope she saw through Max's thin persona as the creation of a man who needs a few more (young) women in his life.
Knowing that I enjoy the occasional fantasy/sci-fi, a student lent me THE ANGEL EXPERIMENT, SCHOOL'S OUT FOREVER, and SAVING THE WORLD AND OTHER EXTREME SPORTS, Young Adult novels by popular best-selling author James Patterson. There is one other book out in the series, another book to come, and a movie in the works. Also, there's a huge web presence for this series and its heroine, the 14 year old Maximum Ride, anchored by the epic and frequently updated blog belonging to Max's friend Fang and the rest of her "flock."
Honestly, YA books are always a tough sell for me, even when they're written by experienced authors and authors of books that I love. Both Michael Chabon (SUMMERLAND) and Carl Hiaasen (FLUSH and HOOT) have let me down even though they rank up there in my top ten living writers.
The Maximum Ride books are similarly thin. I say similarly because, in general, all of these writers share the same fatal flaw and that's that one has to wonder how much time they spend with actual young adults.
I devoured the three books in less than two days. They were zippy reads and the plot (baddies in the science world have created and abused a series of mutant human beings) was compelling albeit deeply lacking in originality: mutant hybrid children with special abilities often derived from animals living in a School with some adults wanting to "use" them for good and others wanting to "use" them for evil. Has Patterson never seen/read/been exposed to X-MEN and TEEN TITANS?? More importantly, does his editor not have truck with this enormous comic and film phenom?
Can James Patterson write anything (and poorly at that) and get it sold? Yes. Yes he can. And he can because every single one of these books hit #1 on the Times Best Seller List.
I just can't believe that teens aren't insulted by these books, or at the very least by the protagonist Max Ride. Other characters fare better; her friend/possible love interest Fang, for example, is more nuanced and charming. Even the talking dog is infinitely more lovable than Max. Max makes me wonder if Patterson likes teen girls or merely finds them snarky and sarcastic. Max acts far older than her 14 years and she can't let three lines pass without throwing in a bitchy zinger.
It's pretty telling that Patterson appears to only have a single child, a son named Jack. Max represents the worst of teenaged girls blown out to stereotype. She's selfish; albeit the "mother" to her "flock"-- Max mothers her flock because it feeds Max's own need to be needed. She's short-sighted. She's incredibly easily irritated and moody. She's finicky and her allegiences change with the breeze. I'm not a mom of a teen girl, but I taught teen girls exclusively for 5 years and taught teen girls and boys for three additional years-- and heck, I WAS a teen girl for seven years-- and I'm terribly put off by Max (and to a certain extent the other female characters Nudge and Angel).
I was also pretty shocked by the extreme level of violence in these books. There's a great deal of blood and smashed bones and wanton murder.
But yes, I read all three books. The student who loaned me the book is an excellent kid. I just hope she saw through Max's thin persona as the creation of a man who needs a few more (young) women in his life.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
BIG MONEY by Jack Getze
My grandfather, bless his dear departed heart, came to fiction late in life. He was kind of a thinky
person's Archie Bunker-- Old school New England and Irish-- and although he married an English major, fiction struck him as a frivolous waste of time until he was hospitalized for an extended period for heart problems and he realized that nothing was as frivolous a waste of time as daytime TV.
G-pa was a tough nut to crack, and it wasn't until, as a pre-teen, I placed in the top ten of the Boston Globe's stock picking challenge for kids that we ever had anything to talk about. For years after, each time I'd visit (before I moved across the street from him), he'd take me out for a banana split and we'd talk stocks until the shared split was gone.
(While I picked those stocks like I now pick football teams-- Dolphins are preeetty-- this one sucess led to a good decade and a half of wandering around miles away from my path. G-pa shipped me off to Business Summer Camp. When I applied to college, five of my eight schools were business schools. Even though I switched my major from Econ to English within a year, I still went almost straight to the business world after college.)
(Sorry kids, Mama's been laid up for a whle. The mind is the first to go. I ramble.)
Point being, when G-pa did "find" fiction, the man hit a formula he liked, began to devour nearly a book a day, and did so til he died.
"Sex and violence, Miss," he'd tell me. "I won't read it unless it's got a heavy helping of sex and violence."
If only my grandfather had lived long enough to meet Austin Carr. The old coot's big blue eyes would have teared up from joy. Sex and violence AND finance? It would have been almost too good to be true. AND Getze's books would have given G-Pa and me one more thing to talk about. Because Getze is a good writer-- a seriously good writer-- and with BIG MONEY one gets the sense that, despite having been a writer for most of his life, he's really just getting cooking.
BIG MONEY is the opposite of a sophomore slump. I dug BIG NUMBERS and gave it a very positive review last June, but Getze's second book features a far more nuanced and and charming Carr and an attention to detail in the prose that kicks the book into a deeper level of richly enjoyable zippy reading. Every metaphor and similie clicks neatly into place. The English teacher in me wanted to write "Great Verbs!" in the margins of nearly every page.
Sure, as a woman, I get a bit tired of the fact that Austin is always thinking with his little Carr, but how do you not love a man who, when all the cards are stacked against him and he's forced to stare into the dark abyss of life, he cries out like Streetcar's Stanley to the symbol of all that is right and good with the world, the holiest of holies-- Shania Twain?
Fun Fact: True Getze fans will recognize yet another alter-ego of the author making a cameo about midway through the book.
As with BIG NUMBERS, Getze will surely be cheated out of readers due to production value of the book. Both Carr and Getze deserve much better. An Amazon reviewer compared Getze to Evanovich, and as I just finished ONE FOR THE MONEY right before I picked up Getze (as with Block, I'm late to the Evanovich game too), I find the comparison apt indeed.
BIG MONEY, no whammies indeed.
person's Archie Bunker-- Old school New England and Irish-- and although he married an English major, fiction struck him as a frivolous waste of time until he was hospitalized for an extended period for heart problems and he realized that nothing was as frivolous a waste of time as daytime TV.G-pa was a tough nut to crack, and it wasn't until, as a pre-teen, I placed in the top ten of the Boston Globe's stock picking challenge for kids that we ever had anything to talk about. For years after, each time I'd visit (before I moved across the street from him), he'd take me out for a banana split and we'd talk stocks until the shared split was gone.
(While I picked those stocks like I now pick football teams-- Dolphins are preeetty-- this one sucess led to a good decade and a half of wandering around miles away from my path. G-pa shipped me off to Business Summer Camp. When I applied to college, five of my eight schools were business schools. Even though I switched my major from Econ to English within a year, I still went almost straight to the business world after college.)
(Sorry kids, Mama's been laid up for a whle. The mind is the first to go. I ramble.)
Point being, when G-pa did "find" fiction, the man hit a formula he liked, began to devour nearly a book a day, and did so til he died.
"Sex and violence, Miss," he'd tell me. "I won't read it unless it's got a heavy helping of sex and violence."
If only my grandfather had lived long enough to meet Austin Carr. The old coot's big blue eyes would have teared up from joy. Sex and violence AND finance? It would have been almost too good to be true. AND Getze's books would have given G-Pa and me one more thing to talk about. Because Getze is a good writer-- a seriously good writer-- and with BIG MONEY one gets the sense that, despite having been a writer for most of his life, he's really just getting cooking.
BIG MONEY is the opposite of a sophomore slump. I dug BIG NUMBERS and gave it a very positive review last June, but Getze's second book features a far more nuanced and and charming Carr and an attention to detail in the prose that kicks the book into a deeper level of richly enjoyable zippy reading. Every metaphor and similie clicks neatly into place. The English teacher in me wanted to write "Great Verbs!" in the margins of nearly every page.
Sure, as a woman, I get a bit tired of the fact that Austin is always thinking with his little Carr, but how do you not love a man who, when all the cards are stacked against him and he's forced to stare into the dark abyss of life, he cries out like Streetcar's Stanley to the symbol of all that is right and good with the world, the holiest of holies-- Shania Twain?
Fun Fact: True Getze fans will recognize yet another alter-ego of the author making a cameo about midway through the book.
As with BIG NUMBERS, Getze will surely be cheated out of readers due to production value of the book. Both Carr and Getze deserve much better. An Amazon reviewer compared Getze to Evanovich, and as I just finished ONE FOR THE MONEY right before I picked up Getze (as with Block, I'm late to the Evanovich game too), I find the comparison apt indeed.
BIG MONEY, no whammies indeed.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
HIT LIST by Lawrence Block
I know. As a fairly avid consumer of genre fiction, I'm seriously behind the eight-ball with just now "discovering" Lawrence Block. But it wasn't until I read The Best Mystery Stories of 2007 that I first came across Block and his sympathetic hit man, John Keller. Yesterday (yes, just yesterday) I hunted down Hit List at a used book store and devoured it in around 24 hours.
The first hit in the book takes place right here in Louisville, and I appreciated Block's careful rendering of my fair city. I don't know if there was ever a stamp collector's store in the Mid-City Mall, but I think I pegged the MCM from the description of the mall on Bardstown Road.
Keller is charming and thoughtful and Block does an amazing job of making him heroic despite his profession and the vaguely callous way he carries it out. My favorite character, though, is his agent, Dot and despite the lack of plot motion during their endless Seinfeldian "conversations about nothing," they're some of my favorite parts of the book.
Both thriller and mystery, Hit List has almost a picaresque feel to it. Each "hit" is a story unto itself as well as a building block to the larger mystery.
The first hit in the book takes place right here in Louisville, and I appreciated Block's careful rendering of my fair city. I don't know if there was ever a stamp collector's store in the Mid-City Mall, but I think I pegged the MCM from the description of the mall on Bardstown Road.
Keller is charming and thoughtful and Block does an amazing job of making him heroic despite his profession and the vaguely callous way he carries it out. My favorite character, though, is his agent, Dot and despite the lack of plot motion during their endless Seinfeldian "conversations about nothing," they're some of my favorite parts of the book.
Both thriller and mystery, Hit List has almost a picaresque feel to it. Each "hit" is a story unto itself as well as a building block to the larger mystery.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
Back in January, I vowed to not read any more books that were compared to Catcher in the Rye. Well, Catcher in the Rye is just about the only book that The Raw Shark Texts has not been compared to. I left my copy of the book at home tonight, but the cover and the inside first few pages is awash with praise, most of it by way of comparisons to (from memory alone): The Matrix, Memento, Borges, Auster, Melville, Jaws, Douglas Adams, the Da Vinci Code, Murakami, Lewis Carroll… the list, truly, is almost to the point of the absurd.
But while the comparisons between Bad Monkeys/Prep and Catcher are clumsy at best and a farce at worst, nearly all of the above comparisons to the Raw Shark Texts are, at least, plausible.
A better reviewer might be able to pinpoint where the genre emerged—the genre of “main character wakes up and has no idea who he/she is and appears to be suffering from nearly complete amnesia.” I cannot. I trace my exposure to said genre to the film Memento, the 2000 psychological thriller featuring an underrated Guy Pearce. Amnesia is not a requirement of this genre; the protagonist must only have a tenuous grasp on reality, a sense that what he or she knows of his or her life may or may not be the “truth” (hence the comparisons to The Matrix, and even to the recent Sci Fi Channel production, Tin Man).
Eric Sanderson wakes in an apartment that he soon finds is his own. He knows his name only from the driver’s license in his pocket. Leaning against the front door is an envelope addressed to him; he opens it and finds a letter directing him to call a Dr. Randle. Dr. Randle explains that Eric is experiencing a dissociative disorder. This is, according to Randle, the eleventh time Eric has completely lost his memory. It all began three years ago when he and his girlfriend, Clio Ames, were vacationing in the Greek Islands. Clio died in a mysterious accident and these episodes are how Eric has been dealing with his grief.
Simple enough, perhaps, until the protagonist Eric begins to receive cryptic daily correspondence from “the First Eric Sanderson,” correspondence that hints to the current Eric’s lack of safety and to a much deeper plot involving “conceptual fish”—creatures that inhabit a surreal alternate existence—the largest and most menacing of which, the Ludovician, has repeatedly devoured Eric’s memories.
I’m still processing my reaction to this book. I read it voraciously in a matter of two days, despite its length. That’s a good sign. As I read it, I thought “I’ve read this before and I’ve read it better,” but I honestly can’t say where or how. I do know that the tragic end of the book hit me like a stiletto to the gut. I read and reread the last two pages to try to find something hopeful or peaceful to cling to. I didn’t find it. And still, two days later, I still feel a bit despondent about it.
It was the snippets of flashback that really got to me. The current Eric Sanderson’s life didn’t affect me to the same degree that the shadows of his true life shook me. Likewise the real-time love story that emerges is far less moving and passionate than the slivers of the love story between the lost Eric and the doomed Clio.
Apparently The Raw Shark Texts was huge in England (whenever I say something like that I am reminded of Matt Dillon in the 1992 movie Singles, talking about his pathetic Seattle grunge band, Citizen Dick, “We’re huge in Belgium, man.”). But my jury is still out on this book. I can say without a doubt that I liked it but that it wasn’t quite worthy of the gushing blurby praise on its cover. It wasn’t as groundbreaking as the critics professed it was, but it broke a little tiny something inside of me. I miss the book, and that’s something.
But while the comparisons between Bad Monkeys/Prep and Catcher are clumsy at best and a farce at worst, nearly all of the above comparisons to the Raw Shark Texts are, at least, plausible.
A better reviewer might be able to pinpoint where the genre emerged—the genre of “main character wakes up and has no idea who he/she is and appears to be suffering from nearly complete amnesia.” I cannot. I trace my exposure to said genre to the film Memento, the 2000 psychological thriller featuring an underrated Guy Pearce. Amnesia is not a requirement of this genre; the protagonist must only have a tenuous grasp on reality, a sense that what he or she knows of his or her life may or may not be the “truth” (hence the comparisons to The Matrix, and even to the recent Sci Fi Channel production, Tin Man).
Eric Sanderson wakes in an apartment that he soon finds is his own. He knows his name only from the driver’s license in his pocket. Leaning against the front door is an envelope addressed to him; he opens it and finds a letter directing him to call a Dr. Randle. Dr. Randle explains that Eric is experiencing a dissociative disorder. This is, according to Randle, the eleventh time Eric has completely lost his memory. It all began three years ago when he and his girlfriend, Clio Ames, were vacationing in the Greek Islands. Clio died in a mysterious accident and these episodes are how Eric has been dealing with his grief.
Simple enough, perhaps, until the protagonist Eric begins to receive cryptic daily correspondence from “the First Eric Sanderson,” correspondence that hints to the current Eric’s lack of safety and to a much deeper plot involving “conceptual fish”—creatures that inhabit a surreal alternate existence—the largest and most menacing of which, the Ludovician, has repeatedly devoured Eric’s memories.
I’m still processing my reaction to this book. I read it voraciously in a matter of two days, despite its length. That’s a good sign. As I read it, I thought “I’ve read this before and I’ve read it better,” but I honestly can’t say where or how. I do know that the tragic end of the book hit me like a stiletto to the gut. I read and reread the last two pages to try to find something hopeful or peaceful to cling to. I didn’t find it. And still, two days later, I still feel a bit despondent about it.
It was the snippets of flashback that really got to me. The current Eric Sanderson’s life didn’t affect me to the same degree that the shadows of his true life shook me. Likewise the real-time love story that emerges is far less moving and passionate than the slivers of the love story between the lost Eric and the doomed Clio.
Apparently The Raw Shark Texts was huge in England (whenever I say something like that I am reminded of Matt Dillon in the 1992 movie Singles, talking about his pathetic Seattle grunge band, Citizen Dick, “We’re huge in Belgium, man.”). But my jury is still out on this book. I can say without a doubt that I liked it but that it wasn’t quite worthy of the gushing blurby praise on its cover. It wasn’t as groundbreaking as the critics professed it was, but it broke a little tiny something inside of me. I miss the book, and that’s something.
March by Geraldine Brooks
Several years ago, I fell in love with a book called Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, a gorgeous historical novel set in a “Plague Village” in England in the mid-1600’s. When Brooks won the Pulitzer in 2006 for her book March, a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women from the POV of the largely absent patriarch of the March family, I knew I would eventually have to give it a read.
In order to appreciate March, it’s not essential that you’re familiar with the story of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, the little women of the original book. I have to admit that when I read Little Women in my teens, I was less enthralled than my mother had been—she’d lauded the book as being the most influential of her life, so much so that she changed her name briefly, I believe, to Beth, when she was a girl. I may be wrong about which little woman she emulated—young Mama-of-Lou was probably more Jo than the sensitive Beth, but that doesn’t ring a bell for me. (Lou, in seventh grade, changed her name to Mary for a year and still has report cards citing Mary’s success as proof.)
More essential is an understanding of the Civil War era of Louisa May Alcott’s young life, especially the philosophical underpinnings of New England during that time period. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne make guest appearances and Mr. March’s character is deeply influenced by Alcott’s father, a radical, transcendentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian preacher from Concord, MA.
That being said, a reader who knows none of this will still welcome the expertly crafted, beautifully woven story of a man whose deeply held beliefs conflicted—sometimes violently— with the prevailing tide of his times.
March, for all of its history and philosophy, is a zippy read. I devoured it in less than two days. Brooks mimics the writers of Alcott’s era with rich descriptions of nature and emotion—the relationship between which echoes the relationships forged by New England transcendentalists. More modern, however, is the depth of pure passion related in the pages, passion not only in the romantic sense but also in the zeal for cause and conviction.
Mid-book, the novel takes a radical turn and shifts POV to another character. I had been so won over by Mr. March’s narration that I was at first angry and discomfited by being removed from a POV I had come to trust. But as I read on, the new perspective won me over, and I began to understand the reason behind the shift. I was afraid that the book had taken a turn for the worse, but instead ended up citing the twist as among the book’s many strengths.
I no longer remember the book’s competition for the 2006 Pulitzer, but I feel quite confident that it would have taken an extraordinary book to be more deserving than March.
In order to appreciate March, it’s not essential that you’re familiar with the story of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, the little women of the original book. I have to admit that when I read Little Women in my teens, I was less enthralled than my mother had been—she’d lauded the book as being the most influential of her life, so much so that she changed her name briefly, I believe, to Beth, when she was a girl. I may be wrong about which little woman she emulated—young Mama-of-Lou was probably more Jo than the sensitive Beth, but that doesn’t ring a bell for me. (Lou, in seventh grade, changed her name to Mary for a year and still has report cards citing Mary’s success as proof.)
More essential is an understanding of the Civil War era of Louisa May Alcott’s young life, especially the philosophical underpinnings of New England during that time period. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne make guest appearances and Mr. March’s character is deeply influenced by Alcott’s father, a radical, transcendentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian preacher from Concord, MA.
That being said, a reader who knows none of this will still welcome the expertly crafted, beautifully woven story of a man whose deeply held beliefs conflicted—sometimes violently— with the prevailing tide of his times.
March, for all of its history and philosophy, is a zippy read. I devoured it in less than two days. Brooks mimics the writers of Alcott’s era with rich descriptions of nature and emotion—the relationship between which echoes the relationships forged by New England transcendentalists. More modern, however, is the depth of pure passion related in the pages, passion not only in the romantic sense but also in the zeal for cause and conviction.
Mid-book, the novel takes a radical turn and shifts POV to another character. I had been so won over by Mr. March’s narration that I was at first angry and discomfited by being removed from a POV I had come to trust. But as I read on, the new perspective won me over, and I began to understand the reason behind the shift. I was afraid that the book had taken a turn for the worse, but instead ended up citing the twist as among the book’s many strengths.
I no longer remember the book’s competition for the 2006 Pulitzer, but I feel quite confident that it would have taken an extraordinary book to be more deserving than March.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Bonk by Mary Roach
I’ve read Mary Roach’s three books in three days. Not three consecutive days, although for Christmas 2006, I received both Stiff and Spook off my Amazon wishlist as presents from a very understanding (or very confused) family member and devoured them on December 25 and 26 respectively. That should tell you a little bit about me and my holidays.
On impulse, just before I went on Spring Break this year, I Googled Roach and found out that her latest book, Bonk, had just been published just days before. Before I even got to the subtitle, I knew I’d have to pick it up in hardcover. When I read the subtitle: “The Curious Intersection Between Sex and Science,” I knew I had scored. No pun intended, although Roach would certainly appreciate the pun.
Stiff remains my favorite non-fiction book period. Although I read Bonk in a matter of less than a day, chuckled my way through it, and admired its art, surprisingly the subject matter of Stiff, the history of experiments on cadavers, is actually a bit more interesting than sex. Not sex itself. But sex studies. And that points to something that Roach attempted to highlight in her book, specifically that sex study has suffered from such restriction that the answer to so many questions about sex is “we don’t know.”
Mary Roach is the David Sedaris of science writing. In order to give her work its due, I’d have to replicate whole chapters here. While the stand-alone chapters in all of her books highlight the works of particular researchers, Roach always becomes a character, more than a guide, in the research. She not only divulges the substance of the research, but she also discusses the process through which she researches the research.
In Bonk, because of the general reluctance of so many researchers to allow a reporter to witness their work (in her Acknowledgements, Roach makes it clear that many of her subjects jeopardized their funding by allowing her to observe), Roach takes this a step further and actually becomes a research participant in two of the studies.
In Chapter Twelve, “Mind Over Vagina,” Roach discusses her own experience at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab at UT Austin. During this experience, she is asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmorgraph probe into her… er… vagina and watch a series of videos. She writes, “I take the probe out of the bag. An LED and some wiring are encased in a round-tipped, bullet-shaped piece of clear acrylic. ‘Cinderella’s tampon,’ I write in my notebook… I follow the instructions I was given, and now the cable is curling down in front of my chair. I feel like a bike lock.”
Roach also memorably convinces her husband, Ed, to participate in a 4-D imaging experiment in an MRI machine in London. She says that her guide to good taste reporting of the experience was to make the chapter describing the 4-D copulation palatable for her stepchildren. It is, understandably, one of the briefest chapters in the book.
On April 9, NPR featured an interview on Roach, where she discussed the nature of the experiments of the (sadly recently deceased) Egyptian doctor Ahmed Shafik; although his studies of sex ranged far and wide, he’ll forever be noted as the man who studied rats who wore teeny-weeny polyester drawstring pants. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact that rats that sport Sopranos-wear get less action than those who wear natural fibers. Stunning discovery, and so sad for the entire state of Florida. What the NPR interview left out, though, was that Shafik was a big fan on polyester leisure suits, although he swore to Roach that he never wore faux-fiber undies.
A.J.Jacobs, author of Year of Living Biblically, says in a blurb for Bonk, “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That is a godsend.” Pardon my girl crush, but Mary Roach on anything is a godsend. I’ve devoured her books, gotten downright testy with people who’ve tried to interrupt my reads.
Despite the severely gory and outrageous content of Stiff I have recommended it with no reservations to my students. That being said, it led to no small discomfort when I happened to blab that Roach had written a new book. My kids asked me what I planned to read during Spring Break, and without thinking I mention Bonk. I insisted quite firmly that the book was not appropriate for teens, but I know for a fact that at least one nascent Roach fan went out and bought it. I read the book with her in mind and realized that while it was, honestly, inappropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but… you know, if I’d known just a little bit more about sex before I started having sex, whole chunks of my life might have been different. Probably different good, not different bad.
Perhaps I am justifying my own bad judgment here, but if Roach’s book makes any final proclamation about the nature of human sexuality it is that she reveals through good humor and scientific study that no one really “has it down” when it comes to sex. We’re all different. And for anyone who’s ever felt slightly insecure when it comes to sex, that’s a reassuring scientific fact, and certainly a fact worth knowing when you’re just starting out.
On impulse, just before I went on Spring Break this year, I Googled Roach and found out that her latest book, Bonk, had just been published just days before. Before I even got to the subtitle, I knew I’d have to pick it up in hardcover. When I read the subtitle: “The Curious Intersection Between Sex and Science,” I knew I had scored. No pun intended, although Roach would certainly appreciate the pun.
Stiff remains my favorite non-fiction book period. Although I read Bonk in a matter of less than a day, chuckled my way through it, and admired its art, surprisingly the subject matter of Stiff, the history of experiments on cadavers, is actually a bit more interesting than sex. Not sex itself. But sex studies. And that points to something that Roach attempted to highlight in her book, specifically that sex study has suffered from such restriction that the answer to so many questions about sex is “we don’t know.”
Mary Roach is the David Sedaris of science writing. In order to give her work its due, I’d have to replicate whole chapters here. While the stand-alone chapters in all of her books highlight the works of particular researchers, Roach always becomes a character, more than a guide, in the research. She not only divulges the substance of the research, but she also discusses the process through which she researches the research.
In Bonk, because of the general reluctance of so many researchers to allow a reporter to witness their work (in her Acknowledgements, Roach makes it clear that many of her subjects jeopardized their funding by allowing her to observe), Roach takes this a step further and actually becomes a research participant in two of the studies.
In Chapter Twelve, “Mind Over Vagina,” Roach discusses her own experience at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab at UT Austin. During this experience, she is asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmorgraph probe into her… er… vagina and watch a series of videos. She writes, “I take the probe out of the bag. An LED and some wiring are encased in a round-tipped, bullet-shaped piece of clear acrylic. ‘Cinderella’s tampon,’ I write in my notebook… I follow the instructions I was given, and now the cable is curling down in front of my chair. I feel like a bike lock.”
Roach also memorably convinces her husband, Ed, to participate in a 4-D imaging experiment in an MRI machine in London. She says that her guide to good taste reporting of the experience was to make the chapter describing the 4-D copulation palatable for her stepchildren. It is, understandably, one of the briefest chapters in the book.
On April 9, NPR featured an interview on Roach, where she discussed the nature of the experiments of the (sadly recently deceased) Egyptian doctor Ahmed Shafik; although his studies of sex ranged far and wide, he’ll forever be noted as the man who studied rats who wore teeny-weeny polyester drawstring pants. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact that rats that sport Sopranos-wear get less action than those who wear natural fibers. Stunning discovery, and so sad for the entire state of Florida. What the NPR interview left out, though, was that Shafik was a big fan on polyester leisure suits, although he swore to Roach that he never wore faux-fiber undies.
A.J.Jacobs, author of Year of Living Biblically, says in a blurb for Bonk, “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That is a godsend.” Pardon my girl crush, but Mary Roach on anything is a godsend. I’ve devoured her books, gotten downright testy with people who’ve tried to interrupt my reads.
Despite the severely gory and outrageous content of Stiff I have recommended it with no reservations to my students. That being said, it led to no small discomfort when I happened to blab that Roach had written a new book. My kids asked me what I planned to read during Spring Break, and without thinking I mention Bonk. I insisted quite firmly that the book was not appropriate for teens, but I know for a fact that at least one nascent Roach fan went out and bought it. I read the book with her in mind and realized that while it was, honestly, inappropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but… you know, if I’d known just a little bit more about sex before I started having sex, whole chunks of my life might have been different. Probably different good, not different bad.
Perhaps I am justifying my own bad judgment here, but if Roach’s book makes any final proclamation about the nature of human sexuality it is that she reveals through good humor and scientific study that no one really “has it down” when it comes to sex. We’re all different. And for anyone who’s ever felt slightly insecure when it comes to sex, that’s a reassuring scientific fact, and certainly a fact worth knowing when you’re just starting out.
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
A non-fiction book isn’t a novel. Non-fiction is real life, and real life is sloppy, complicated, and sometimes, as in the case of Three Cups of Tea, more far-fetched than fiction. It’s possible that if Greg Mortenson had pitched Three Cups of Tea as a novel to a New York agent his query would have been rejected for being too grandiose.
The thing is, “grandiose” is a word that just doesn’t apply to Mortenson, who spoke on April 1, 2008 to a group of Louisville high school students at the Mohammad Ali Center. He delivered his speech by the light of only the slides he projected on the giant screen; he was soft spoken, but reluctant to use the microphone. And despite the fact that the speech lasted less than an hour, by the end of his time with the students, they were fired up, believers, converts to his mission.
His mission is dictated by a proverb he learned while growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
Since 1993, Mortenson has worked to build more than fifty schools, mostly for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s raised several million dollars for the efforts, survived crushing personal defeats and failures, conquered two fatwas issued against him, become a sort of folk hero in the regions which he’s helped, provided education for tens of thousands of children who would otherwise go un- or inadequately-educated, started a family of his own, written a book that’s landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and become president of the Central Asia Institute.
I lump his accomplishments of the past fifteen years together to amplify their already massive significance; the cover of the book touts a blurb by Tom Brokaw that reads, “Thrilling… proof that one ordinary person… really can change the world.” But there are times when you’re reading the book when you feel as though you’re watching a B adventure movie; when you, as the audience, have already figured out that the shifty Changazi cannot be trusted to warehouse Mortenson’s building supplies, that the men on horseback have no humanitarian issues in mind, that the little old lady in Atlanta is no benefactress. So often, early on when Mortenson seems to fail more often than he succeeds, you find yourself slamming your fist into your desk as you read, cursing the naiveté of this teddy bear of a trusting man who seems determined to overreach, to dream too big.
The lesson of the book, and the reason people are already speculating about Nobel Prize nominations for this man, is of course that Mortenson didn’t overreach. He may have been foolhardy and overly trusting at times—and one gets the sense that he probably still is—but in the end his original ambitions paled that which he has been able to accomplish.
It’s probably a good thing that Mortenson sought out a co-author, not the least of which because the book wouldn’t have been written. This book that nearly lionizes him features interviews with those in his close company who say that he drives them crazy; when he’s not abroad making things happen, he’s a veritable hermit. But after having seen Mortenson speak, it’s easy to believe that if he’d written the book himself, we’d have an overly humble account of his success.
At the speech, he recounted the story of the beginning of his journey; an avid climber, Mortenson swore that he would summit K2 in 1993 to leave a tribute to his younger sister who’d died of epilepsy. According to Mortenson, he’d failed and it was his failure and his subsequent depression that spurred him to promise the small village that helped rescue and nurse him that he would build a school for them. All fine and true, but students who failed to read the book after seeing the speech would have missed out on the fact that Mortenson failed to summit because he chose instead to save the life of a member of his climbing party who’d been reckless and become ill.
That being said, the coauthor, David Oliver Relin, doesn’t quite do the story justice. At times the story is slow and cluttered; the writing is well organized but artless. It’s such a laborious read at the beginning that by the time the first school is built, you feel quite sure that this is the denouement; a full character arc has crested and settled even though there’s still a full half of the book to scale.
That’s Mortenson’s heroism; any mortal would have settled for the thudding achievement of having built not only a school, but a bridge to the school, in this remote, forsaken region of Pakistan under the shadow of K2. Instead Mortenson parlays this success into greater opportunity to spread education throughout the troubled region.
Even in America, education is the answer—or at least one of the answers—to what ails us. In the Middle East, education may be the route to peace and to our own national security. A boy who is educated is much less likely to be swayed to join a terrorist group; a girl who is educated is less likely to become a mother who would sanction her son’s involvement in terror. Women who are educated suffer less infant mortality and are likely to bear fewer children, reducing poverty.
And who better to provide that education? Mortenson was in Pakistan when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. He left weeks later, but returned just weeks after that to places that had been devastated by American retaliation. As America itself had become the source of so much suffering of so many innocent people, here was an American bringing books and buildings and teachers to ameliorate the foundation of hatred against the West—ignorance.
As the old American proverb goes, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” and Mortenson is no exception. Reading Three Cups of Tea, it’s hard at times to not feel as though the emotional hero of the book is Mortenson’s wife Tara, whom he met and married after just six days. Tara is the Mother Teresa of wives (I can just hear a literary agent saying to Mortenson: “You know, Greg, the novel would be much more believable if you left out the part about visiting Mother Teresa’s body as she lay in state. That’s overkill.” Seriously, the guy, on a whim, gets to visit the dead saint’s body!).
The whole book, at times, feels like overkill, sloppy, complicated, larger-than-life overkill. And that’s the beauty of non-fiction, it sometimes feels like the elaborate lead-up to a monumental tall tale, “Let me tell you the one about the guy who grew up in Africa with a sister with epilepsy who died and then he tried to climb K2 and was rescued by a village… and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
The thing is, “grandiose” is a word that just doesn’t apply to Mortenson, who spoke on April 1, 2008 to a group of Louisville high school students at the Mohammad Ali Center. He delivered his speech by the light of only the slides he projected on the giant screen; he was soft spoken, but reluctant to use the microphone. And despite the fact that the speech lasted less than an hour, by the end of his time with the students, they were fired up, believers, converts to his mission.
His mission is dictated by a proverb he learned while growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
Since 1993, Mortenson has worked to build more than fifty schools, mostly for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s raised several million dollars for the efforts, survived crushing personal defeats and failures, conquered two fatwas issued against him, become a sort of folk hero in the regions which he’s helped, provided education for tens of thousands of children who would otherwise go un- or inadequately-educated, started a family of his own, written a book that’s landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and become president of the Central Asia Institute.
I lump his accomplishments of the past fifteen years together to amplify their already massive significance; the cover of the book touts a blurb by Tom Brokaw that reads, “Thrilling… proof that one ordinary person… really can change the world.” But there are times when you’re reading the book when you feel as though you’re watching a B adventure movie; when you, as the audience, have already figured out that the shifty Changazi cannot be trusted to warehouse Mortenson’s building supplies, that the men on horseback have no humanitarian issues in mind, that the little old lady in Atlanta is no benefactress. So often, early on when Mortenson seems to fail more often than he succeeds, you find yourself slamming your fist into your desk as you read, cursing the naiveté of this teddy bear of a trusting man who seems determined to overreach, to dream too big.
The lesson of the book, and the reason people are already speculating about Nobel Prize nominations for this man, is of course that Mortenson didn’t overreach. He may have been foolhardy and overly trusting at times—and one gets the sense that he probably still is—but in the end his original ambitions paled that which he has been able to accomplish.
It’s probably a good thing that Mortenson sought out a co-author, not the least of which because the book wouldn’t have been written. This book that nearly lionizes him features interviews with those in his close company who say that he drives them crazy; when he’s not abroad making things happen, he’s a veritable hermit. But after having seen Mortenson speak, it’s easy to believe that if he’d written the book himself, we’d have an overly humble account of his success.
At the speech, he recounted the story of the beginning of his journey; an avid climber, Mortenson swore that he would summit K2 in 1993 to leave a tribute to his younger sister who’d died of epilepsy. According to Mortenson, he’d failed and it was his failure and his subsequent depression that spurred him to promise the small village that helped rescue and nurse him that he would build a school for them. All fine and true, but students who failed to read the book after seeing the speech would have missed out on the fact that Mortenson failed to summit because he chose instead to save the life of a member of his climbing party who’d been reckless and become ill.
That being said, the coauthor, David Oliver Relin, doesn’t quite do the story justice. At times the story is slow and cluttered; the writing is well organized but artless. It’s such a laborious read at the beginning that by the time the first school is built, you feel quite sure that this is the denouement; a full character arc has crested and settled even though there’s still a full half of the book to scale.
That’s Mortenson’s heroism; any mortal would have settled for the thudding achievement of having built not only a school, but a bridge to the school, in this remote, forsaken region of Pakistan under the shadow of K2. Instead Mortenson parlays this success into greater opportunity to spread education throughout the troubled region.
Even in America, education is the answer—or at least one of the answers—to what ails us. In the Middle East, education may be the route to peace and to our own national security. A boy who is educated is much less likely to be swayed to join a terrorist group; a girl who is educated is less likely to become a mother who would sanction her son’s involvement in terror. Women who are educated suffer less infant mortality and are likely to bear fewer children, reducing poverty.
And who better to provide that education? Mortenson was in Pakistan when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. He left weeks later, but returned just weeks after that to places that had been devastated by American retaliation. As America itself had become the source of so much suffering of so many innocent people, here was an American bringing books and buildings and teachers to ameliorate the foundation of hatred against the West—ignorance.
As the old American proverb goes, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” and Mortenson is no exception. Reading Three Cups of Tea, it’s hard at times to not feel as though the emotional hero of the book is Mortenson’s wife Tara, whom he met and married after just six days. Tara is the Mother Teresa of wives (I can just hear a literary agent saying to Mortenson: “You know, Greg, the novel would be much more believable if you left out the part about visiting Mother Teresa’s body as she lay in state. That’s overkill.” Seriously, the guy, on a whim, gets to visit the dead saint’s body!).
The whole book, at times, feels like overkill, sloppy, complicated, larger-than-life overkill. And that’s the beauty of non-fiction, it sometimes feels like the elaborate lead-up to a monumental tall tale, “Let me tell you the one about the guy who grew up in Africa with a sister with epilepsy who died and then he tried to climb K2 and was rescued by a village… and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie
Tom Selleck, back in the day, was a babe. No one's going to argue that point. In the early 80's, he did for hairy chests and moustaches what vintage Bruce Willis did for receding hairlines and lipless smirks. But while most of those traits continued to echo as pseudo-sexy through pop culture from that point forward (and continued to echo through my personal life as I aged and started getting involved with men lacking lips and a full head of hair), the moustache remains a signifier of days-gone-by, porn stars, and gay men.
Jennifer Crusie's book, Manhunting, a recent reissue first published in 1993, offers an affable love interest in Jake Templeton, a man who is refreshingly low-key compared to heroine Kate Svenson's high-anxiety superficiality. He's a man's man, at least at first; a lawnmowing, beer-swilling, afternoon-napping hunk of a man with one fatal flaw. He's got a moustache. A big fuzzy Wyatt Earp-sized one. And somehow, through all of her hemming and hawing about whether or not Jake is her "type," Kate never seems to weigh that in the balance. And she weighs just about everything else. Odd.
Thrice engaged but finicky Kate is a daughter of a tycoon, set to inherit the whole kit and kaboodle of his empire. But her biological-- or certainly her marital-- clock is a-ticking. Challenged by her best friend to make a plan to find a man, she books a trip to a rustic-upscale Kentucky golf lodge that sounds more like Club Med (luaus and karaoke) than your usual staid corporate resort. Mr. Kate needs to be rich, handsome, liberated, ambitious, well-coiffed-- everything Jake, the groundskeeper of the Cabin Resort, is not.
Of course, in the long run, Jake isn't who he seems to be. Ambition takes a back seat to love. Priorities are reorganized and people meet each other halfway. It wouldn't be a romance novel, otherwise.
Crusie is always good for a laugh or two. Her fast-paced and witty prose allows you to zip through her books at a satisfying rate. I've taken a few classes from her, and she's a super-tough cookie. And most of her heroines are super-tough cookies too. Kate, not so much. Min Dobbs of Bet Me or Tilda Goodnight of Faking It are much more compelling characters than Kate Svenson.
In the introduction to this reissue (which begins memorably: "Fifteen years ago, I decided to write a romance novel. I was twelve. Okay, I was forty-one, but I was young at heart. ") Crusie expresses her sentimental love for the book; it clearly tickles her. But she also identifies the book as flawed. And it is. But it surfs by so quickly that you hardly notice. Although it's impossible not to notice the prairie dog under Jake's nose-- gives me the willies, it does.
Note: Crusie has a fantastic website and a strong fan base. You can visit both here.
Jennifer Crusie's book, Manhunting, a recent reissue first published in 1993, offers an affable love interest in Jake Templeton, a man who is refreshingly low-key compared to heroine Kate Svenson's high-anxiety superficiality. He's a man's man, at least at first; a lawnmowing, beer-swilling, afternoon-napping hunk of a man with one fatal flaw. He's got a moustache. A big fuzzy Wyatt Earp-sized one. And somehow, through all of her hemming and hawing about whether or not Jake is her "type," Kate never seems to weigh that in the balance. And she weighs just about everything else. Odd.
Thrice engaged but finicky Kate is a daughter of a tycoon, set to inherit the whole kit and kaboodle of his empire. But her biological-- or certainly her marital-- clock is a-ticking. Challenged by her best friend to make a plan to find a man, she books a trip to a rustic-upscale Kentucky golf lodge that sounds more like Club Med (luaus and karaoke) than your usual staid corporate resort. Mr. Kate needs to be rich, handsome, liberated, ambitious, well-coiffed-- everything Jake, the groundskeeper of the Cabin Resort, is not.
Of course, in the long run, Jake isn't who he seems to be. Ambition takes a back seat to love. Priorities are reorganized and people meet each other halfway. It wouldn't be a romance novel, otherwise.
Crusie is always good for a laugh or two. Her fast-paced and witty prose allows you to zip through her books at a satisfying rate. I've taken a few classes from her, and she's a super-tough cookie. And most of her heroines are super-tough cookies too. Kate, not so much. Min Dobbs of Bet Me or Tilda Goodnight of Faking It are much more compelling characters than Kate Svenson.
In the introduction to this reissue (which begins memorably: "Fifteen years ago, I decided to write a romance novel. I was twelve. Okay, I was forty-one, but I was young at heart. ") Crusie expresses her sentimental love for the book; it clearly tickles her. But she also identifies the book as flawed. And it is. But it surfs by so quickly that you hardly notice. Although it's impossible not to notice the prairie dog under Jake's nose-- gives me the willies, it does.
Note: Crusie has a fantastic website and a strong fan base. You can visit both here.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
The "what the hell happened?" ending of Shutter Island is as thuddingly fantastic as the "what the heck was that?" ending of Bad Monkeys was terrible. This thrilling, terrifying book kept me on edge and confused (in a good way) from beginning to end.
Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, opens the book with a mystery and then plunges us back in time nearly forty years and begins again with a second mystery. Around eighty pages into this book, I was so hooked that I told Roommate: "This ought to be a series-- Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are so well-drawn." He just gave me a look and said, "Wait."
Wait, indeed.
Primarily set on a island in Boston Harbor, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Shutter Island takes place during a 1954 hurricane. Maybe. New partners, Daniels and Aule, US Marshalls, are called in to help find an escaped female inmate who has been hospitalized after murdering her four children. Maybe. Once on the island, trapped by the incoming storm, they're confronted by resistant faculty, the possibility of unethical practices, and a deeper, more personal mystery for Daniels. Sort of.
This cinematic novel is, appropriately enough, is in pre-production for a movie release in 2009. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie will reportedly star Leo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels (Leo seems too young for the part, to me) and Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule. Michelle Williams, the mother of the late Heath Ledger's child Mathilda, is slated to star as Teddy's wife. Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson have also been cast. (The movie name has reportedly just been changed to Ashecliffe).
I haven't read any of Lehane's other novels, but they're heading for my bullpen right now. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Lehane's keynote reading for Eckerd College's "Writers in Paradise" Workshop in St. Petersberg, Florida. He read a chapter from his upcoming historical fiction A Given Day about the 1919 Boston Police strike. Absolutely gripping stuff and he's a gifted, engaging reader. (And, I'm not too proud to say, easy on the ol' peepers.) This may be a book I buy in hardcover.
Shutter Island wins the prize for the best book I've read in the past few months. I've read a bunch of clunkers, I'm afraid. Yes, The Road may be the "best" book that I've read lately, but it left me feeling so thoroughly roughed-up that I can't classify it as a "good read." Important, yes. Good, not so much.
Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, opens the book with a mystery and then plunges us back in time nearly forty years and begins again with a second mystery. Around eighty pages into this book, I was so hooked that I told Roommate: "This ought to be a series-- Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are so well-drawn." He just gave me a look and said, "Wait."
Wait, indeed.
Primarily set on a island in Boston Harbor, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Shutter Island takes place during a 1954 hurricane. Maybe. New partners, Daniels and Aule, US Marshalls, are called in to help find an escaped female inmate who has been hospitalized after murdering her four children. Maybe. Once on the island, trapped by the incoming storm, they're confronted by resistant faculty, the possibility of unethical practices, and a deeper, more personal mystery for Daniels. Sort of.
This cinematic novel is, appropriately enough, is in pre-production for a movie release in 2009. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie will reportedly star Leo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels (Leo seems too young for the part, to me) and Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule. Michelle Williams, the mother of the late Heath Ledger's child Mathilda, is slated to star as Teddy's wife. Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson have also been cast. (The movie name has reportedly just been changed to Ashecliffe).
I haven't read any of Lehane's other novels, but they're heading for my bullpen right now. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Lehane's keynote reading for Eckerd College's "Writers in Paradise" Workshop in St. Petersberg, Florida. He read a chapter from his upcoming historical fiction A Given Day about the 1919 Boston Police strike. Absolutely gripping stuff and he's a gifted, engaging reader. (And, I'm not too proud to say, easy on the ol' peepers.) This may be a book I buy in hardcover.
Shutter Island wins the prize for the best book I've read in the past few months. I've read a bunch of clunkers, I'm afraid. Yes, The Road may be the "best" book that I've read lately, but it left me feeling so thoroughly roughed-up that I can't classify it as a "good read." Important, yes. Good, not so much.
Lou's been blurbed
Lordy that sounds so dirty.
A quote from my review of Jack Getze's Big Numbers has made its way on Getze's website. Tee hee.
I wasn't aware of this until I saw Jack this past weekend. He was talking about good blurbs and he said, "I love this one: 'Indiana Jones has his whip and Luke Skywalker has his light saber, but for Austin Carr...the 'full-boat Carr grin' is his weapon of choice.' I use it in all my promotional material."
Lou laughed like a goofball and said, "Oh yeah, that's a good one."
It was that at that point that Jack said: "Yeah, you wrote it."
I do not know who this Melissa person is.
A quote from my review of Jack Getze's Big Numbers has made its way on Getze's website. Tee hee.
I wasn't aware of this until I saw Jack this past weekend. He was talking about good blurbs and he said, "I love this one: 'Indiana Jones has his whip and Luke Skywalker has his light saber, but for Austin Carr...the 'full-boat Carr grin' is his weapon of choice.' I use it in all my promotional material."
Lou laughed like a goofball and said, "Oh yeah, that's a good one."
It was that at that point that Jack said: "Yeah, you wrote it."
I do not know who this Melissa person is.
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
As I mentioned in my post about Bad Monkeys, I hereby announce that I will not read any more books that are compared to Catcher in the Rye. But, at least I got the allusion when it came to Bad Monkeys; there was a little Holden Caufield in Jane Charlotte, a subconscious desire to catch the little kids before they tumbled off the cliff.
There is no such good will in Lee Fiora. She's a teenaged loner and misanthrope without the bad-ass sex appeal that might normally go along with that sort of "outsider" status. Lee's just not a particularly good kid at all. She's a mediocre student from South Bend, Indiana, who applied to New England prep schools in order circumvent the lower-middle class banal existence of her family (who come across as far cooler and more likable than she ever does, despite the fact that she's perpetually embarrassed by them). She ends up at the New England blue blood boarding school Ault as a "scholarship kid." She never really fits in. Never. The book spans 416 tedious pages and her four years of high school and Lee doesn't change. She doesn't grow-- or doesn't grow much. And worst of all, nothing happens. Seriously. Nothing of note happens. A suicide attempt by a friend. Loss of virginity to a jerk-off. Opportunities missed and ignored. Friends made and alienated. Family insulted. That's the plot, folks.
But Lou, you may be saying, Lee's a teenager. All teenagers are shits.
Herein may have lain the problem for me: I work with teens every day (and no, they are not all shits) and this "window onto a teen's life" bored me senseless. I have front row seats to teens' lives every day. And they grow and change and things happen to them beyond the routine things that happened to Lee. I was also a scholarship kid at a tony New England prep school (although it was a day school). I wasn't as much of an outsider as Lee, but I was definitely in the "unpopular" clique. And shit happened to me too. And I changed and grew during the course of my four years there. At the end of the book (I don't consider this a spoiler) when she nearly flunks out her senior year for giving up on her math exam, I couldn't believe that she was the exact same train wreck that she was when she first came to Ault.
To say this book was hyped is understatement. Sittenfeld has been compared to Salinger, Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion, Carson McCullers, Melissa Bank, Wally Lamb, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolf, Judy Blume. The list makes the mind whirl. The book was well written, yes. But a classic? Innovative? Fresh? No.
My burning question: Why wasn't this YA? It is, indeed, a far sight better than the Gossip Girls crap my kids are reading these days.
There is no such good will in Lee Fiora. She's a teenaged loner and misanthrope without the bad-ass sex appeal that might normally go along with that sort of "outsider" status. Lee's just not a particularly good kid at all. She's a mediocre student from South Bend, Indiana, who applied to New England prep schools in order circumvent the lower-middle class banal existence of her family (who come across as far cooler and more likable than she ever does, despite the fact that she's perpetually embarrassed by them). She ends up at the New England blue blood boarding school Ault as a "scholarship kid." She never really fits in. Never. The book spans 416 tedious pages and her four years of high school and Lee doesn't change. She doesn't grow-- or doesn't grow much. And worst of all, nothing happens. Seriously. Nothing of note happens. A suicide attempt by a friend. Loss of virginity to a jerk-off. Opportunities missed and ignored. Friends made and alienated. Family insulted. That's the plot, folks.
But Lou, you may be saying, Lee's a teenager. All teenagers are shits.
Herein may have lain the problem for me: I work with teens every day (and no, they are not all shits) and this "window onto a teen's life" bored me senseless. I have front row seats to teens' lives every day. And they grow and change and things happen to them beyond the routine things that happened to Lee. I was also a scholarship kid at a tony New England prep school (although it was a day school). I wasn't as much of an outsider as Lee, but I was definitely in the "unpopular" clique. And shit happened to me too. And I changed and grew during the course of my four years there. At the end of the book (I don't consider this a spoiler) when she nearly flunks out her senior year for giving up on her math exam, I couldn't believe that she was the exact same train wreck that she was when she first came to Ault.
To say this book was hyped is understatement. Sittenfeld has been compared to Salinger, Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion, Carson McCullers, Melissa Bank, Wally Lamb, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolf, Judy Blume. The list makes the mind whirl. The book was well written, yes. But a classic? Innovative? Fresh? No.
My burning question: Why wasn't this YA? It is, indeed, a far sight better than the Gossip Girls crap my kids are reading these days.
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
Jonathan Ames of the New York Times Book Review called this: "something of a science fiction Catcher in the Rye" and maybe my problems with the genius author Matt Ruff's latest book starts there. (Maybe henceforth I should avoid all books that are compared to Salinger's classic, as I'm about to review and likewise grumble about Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld which was similarly lauded).
Ruff's Fool on the Hill may be my favorite book of all time. Let me qualify that: there are books that I adore that are "better" books, classics or more likely to become classics. But no book speaks to my sensibilities as a reader more than Ruff's debut novel, Fool. It's magical. It's hilarious. And it's superbly written. Oozes charm. It's like a better-written (sorry mega-fans) Douglas Adams' book only rooted in fantasy rather than sci-fi. In my opinion, though, Ruff's subsequent three books have been increasingly disappointing, and Bad Monkeys, although well-reviewed and prize-winning (2008 PBNA and 2008 Alex winner), felt a little insulting.
This sci-fi thriller mystery is told during a series of therapy sessions while Jane Charlotte is locked up in the Las Vegas County Jail. It traces her journey from her troubled youth to her recruitment and subsequent (maybe) betrayal by the "Bad Monkeys," a code name for a department of a top-secret organization bent on leveling out the playing field between good and evil. Is Jane sane? Is she a mercenary who murders with a gun whose "ammunition" is meant to mimic death by natural causes? Is she absolutely out of her gourd? How could a lunatic craft such a detailed and elaborate life fiction? Why does so little of her story check out? All these questions are presented to Dr Vale, her psychotherapist. But are the answered satisfactorily by the end?
The end. Hmph. The most common complaint on the book's Amazon reviews site (I'm a curmudgeon clearly, the book is averaging 4-stars) is the end. And I admit, while I was disappointed in the whole book, it was the end that made me nuts. I could handle the Shutter Island/Life of Pi level "what's really going on here" type questions. In fact, I love books that leave you wondering. But Monkeys dumps you in the middle of that quandary right away and instead of leaving us wondering, it wrapped things up in, what was in my mind, a ludicrous and unpredictable (in a bad way) way.
It's easier to be disappointed by a writer that you love than a writer you're ambivalent about. One of the things that really burned my buns is that the book is chock-full of the Ruff-ness that I love; the ludicrously clever ideas, the real-as-life dialogue, the Big Thoughts tossed around so casually. But the plot, for me, just didn't hold up.
Read Fool on the Hill instead. I do, about once every two or three years.
Ruff's Fool on the Hill may be my favorite book of all time. Let me qualify that: there are books that I adore that are "better" books, classics or more likely to become classics. But no book speaks to my sensibilities as a reader more than Ruff's debut novel, Fool. It's magical. It's hilarious. And it's superbly written. Oozes charm. It's like a better-written (sorry mega-fans) Douglas Adams' book only rooted in fantasy rather than sci-fi. In my opinion, though, Ruff's subsequent three books have been increasingly disappointing, and Bad Monkeys, although well-reviewed and prize-winning (2008 PBNA and 2008 Alex winner), felt a little insulting.
This sci-fi thriller mystery is told during a series of therapy sessions while Jane Charlotte is locked up in the Las Vegas County Jail. It traces her journey from her troubled youth to her recruitment and subsequent (maybe) betrayal by the "Bad Monkeys," a code name for a department of a top-secret organization bent on leveling out the playing field between good and evil. Is Jane sane? Is she a mercenary who murders with a gun whose "ammunition" is meant to mimic death by natural causes? Is she absolutely out of her gourd? How could a lunatic craft such a detailed and elaborate life fiction? Why does so little of her story check out? All these questions are presented to Dr Vale, her psychotherapist. But are the answered satisfactorily by the end?
The end. Hmph. The most common complaint on the book's Amazon reviews site (I'm a curmudgeon clearly, the book is averaging 4-stars) is the end. And I admit, while I was disappointed in the whole book, it was the end that made me nuts. I could handle the Shutter Island/Life of Pi level "what's really going on here" type questions. In fact, I love books that leave you wondering. But Monkeys dumps you in the middle of that quandary right away and instead of leaving us wondering, it wrapped things up in, what was in my mind, a ludicrous and unpredictable (in a bad way) way.
It's easier to be disappointed by a writer that you love than a writer you're ambivalent about. One of the things that really burned my buns is that the book is chock-full of the Ruff-ness that I love; the ludicrously clever ideas, the real-as-life dialogue, the Big Thoughts tossed around so casually. But the plot, for me, just didn't hold up.
Read Fool on the Hill instead. I do, about once every two or three years.
Monday, January 28, 2008
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I've been meaning to get a little McCarthy under my belt for years, but it's hard to get psyched up to read books that I know are dark and violent. When No Country for Old Men came out as a movie by the Coen brothers a couple months ago, I pulled The Road-- the book that seems to be most highly recommended by my friends-- off the shelf and put it in the bullpen.
Ooof. It seems like the only way to properly describe the effect that this book had on me is to make unintelligible, grunty, despairing sounds. Oooof. Uuhhh. Shhhh. Ohhhhh. Insert long, deep, desperate sigh here.
I can't remember the last time I was so rattled by a book. At first I had to read it in small doses because of weight of every single page. This stilted progress is problematic as the book is written in teeny tiny scenes, each just a few paragraphs, sometimes a few words, and each as relatively non-descript as the next. McCarthy uses this jarring, indistinct form to mirror the daily monotony and lack of hope of the two (and practically only) characters, the man and the boy. These characters are unnamed, of course, because why would names matter in a post-apocolyptic America? They are also relatively characterless and historyless. Likewise (semi-spoiler here) we never find out what has destroyed nearly all of humanity save a few rogue bands of murderous survivors and the even fewer lone wanderers and has scorched the earth so much that dead bodies, at times, are seared to the blacktop of highways, mummified and twisted in pain.
I read the last chunk of the book in a single sitting in Starbucks. Huge mistake. Unwilling to sob in public as I turned the last few pages, I swallowed my despair and ended up haunted by it for days. Don't take that comment lightly. Quite literally, I went home, made myself comfort food, and then curled on the couch, despondant, for the rest of the evening. Simply revisiting the book right now has hurled me into a funk.
The book is more prose poetry than fiction. There are few writers who use verbs more vividly:
Ooof. It seems like the only way to properly describe the effect that this book had on me is to make unintelligible, grunty, despairing sounds. Oooof. Uuhhh. Shhhh. Ohhhhh. Insert long, deep, desperate sigh here.
I can't remember the last time I was so rattled by a book. At first I had to read it in small doses because of weight of every single page. This stilted progress is problematic as the book is written in teeny tiny scenes, each just a few paragraphs, sometimes a few words, and each as relatively non-descript as the next. McCarthy uses this jarring, indistinct form to mirror the daily monotony and lack of hope of the two (and practically only) characters, the man and the boy. These characters are unnamed, of course, because why would names matter in a post-apocolyptic America? They are also relatively characterless and historyless. Likewise (semi-spoiler here) we never find out what has destroyed nearly all of humanity save a few rogue bands of murderous survivors and the even fewer lone wanderers and has scorched the earth so much that dead bodies, at times, are seared to the blacktop of highways, mummified and twisted in pain.
I read the last chunk of the book in a single sitting in Starbucks. Huge mistake. Unwilling to sob in public as I turned the last few pages, I swallowed my despair and ended up haunted by it for days. Don't take that comment lightly. Quite literally, I went home, made myself comfort food, and then curled on the couch, despondant, for the rest of the evening. Simply revisiting the book right now has hurled me into a funk.
The book is more prose poetry than fiction. There are few writers who use verbs more vividly:
"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.Frankly, I don't know what to do with a book like this. A book about a boy of 6 or 7 who knows how to shoot himself in the mouth if he is taken captive by the murderous others. A book about an earth so destroyed that nothing-- not flora nor fauna-- survives. A book that in my opinion (in contrast to the opinions of many reviewers) ends on a note that is thoroughly devoid of even a sliver of hope-- not just for the characters, but for humanity as a whole. I can't not recommend this book. It's exquisite. But, seriously, have either a bottle of Jack Daniels and a whole lot of hangover time or the collected works of Monty Python available for you after you've finished.
Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over
the blacktop... Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the
ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his
warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
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