Lou Reads

PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach

2010-11-08T23:15:00.000-05:00

In an increasingly secular world populated by increasingly cynical adults (like me), holidays have lost some of their inherent shininess. Really, when was the last time you got excited about Easter? I propose that, in order to replace those holidays that have lost their shine, every adult should have the right to declare a certain number of days a year as “personal holidays.”

If that proposal came to fruition, every time Mary Roach published a new book, I would declare a personal holiday.

There are few writers who are so consistently good. And there are fewer who are so good when writing about about such diverse material.** Roach’s previous three books have been on subjects that are already interesting in their own right: death, the afterlife, and sex. Roach’s fourth book, PACKING FOR MARS, is about a subject that is, at its core, relatively interesting. But while I would-- and have-- read a book on death, the afterlife, or sex, of my own volition, I’ve never before been compelled to pick up a book about the space travel program.

Roach could write about anything at this point, and I will pre-order her book from Amazon as soon as its announced.

PACKING FOR MARS explores the complications of space travel from a very Roach-ian prospective. Sure, she’s a science writer, but she’s not interested in aero-space engineering and the math involved. She’s interested in the many dozens of ways that NASA and other countries’ space agencies have tried to deal with the problem of disposing of feces in space. She’s not interested in how we’re going to get people BACK from Mars if we ever send them there (and scarily enough, she’s discovered that some plans to send American astronauts to Mars do NOT include return plans). She’s interested in how people have sex in zero gravity and whether or not sperm need gravity to swim.

Whether she’s suppressing the urge to vomit on a parabolic flight or genially swigging reclaimed urine (apparently, it’s refreshing and surprisingly sweet), Roach is as compelling a character as the many astronauts she interviews for the book. Maybe my favorite thing about Roach is that she’s a humorist who doesn’t knee-jerk rely on our generation’s crutch of snark. Her shit is just plain funny. “Compressed food not only took up less stowage-- which is how children and aircraft designers say ‘storage’-- space, it was less likely to crumble,” writes Roach in a typical aside.

Unless you’re a space junkie, STIFF-- Roach’s debut book-- is a better introduction to her writing. But PACKING FOR MARS is a book more than worthy of her.

** The only non-fiction author that rivals Roach in the ability to make anything interesting is Jon Mooallem, who has yet to write a book. Mooallem has, for the New York Times Magazine, written articles about pigeon control and the complications of creating bagged apple slices that are drool-inducingly mesmerizing. Mooallem, where the heck is your book?

BARELY BEWITCHED by Kimberly Frost

2010-10-29T22:11:00.001-04:00

BARELY BEWITCHED is the second in Frost's "Southern Witch Novel" series. I reviewed WOULD-BE WITCH in 2009, and for more background on the series, it's best to start there.

As with my previous review of Frost's book, I offer this declaimer: This is a minor friend full-disclosure. While I don't know Kimberly that well, we do travel in the same circles and have a lot of friends in common.

And with this review, that disclaimer is kind of important.

When you're talking about books written by people that you know, or even sort of know, things get a little tricky. Especially when you know them, as I do Frost, precisely because they're uber-talented. When you have a talented writer acquaintance who has finally made the big leagues of publishing, there's sometimes a disparity between what they've actually published and what you wish they had published. You probably sensed that a little from my review of WOULD-BE WITCH. And it remains true for BARELY BEWITCHED.

In both books, Frost's writing sings. Our narrator is funny and sarcastic and smart, and the descriptions and setting feel real and paint authentic Texas in your mind's eye. But the narrator's obvious smarts are undermined by the relationships that she has. Her ex-husband is controlling and piggish-- but somehow still attractive to her? The budding love interest, Bryn, demeans her on one hand and lusts for her on the other. Why would an obviously spunky, bright woman like Tammy Jo forge these kinds of relationships?

The good news is that by the end of BARELY BEWITCHED, Tammy Jo Trask seems to be headed in the right direction as a character and with her relationships. A direction that is much more worthy of her and her author.

In BARELY BEWITCHED, our hapless amateur witch has snagged the attention of the greater witching community. It's clear now that her powers are significant, if untamed, and the World Association of Magic has sent two sketchy characters to come and train her for a test so she can join the community or... well, fail and die. But when Tammy Jo fails an initial challenge, she's punished with a curse that unwittingly causes her to unleash pixie dust upon poor Duval, Texas, sending the entire town into an orgiastic, destructive fit of bacchanalia. Like WBW with the invasion of werewolves, BB puts the entire town on the line. If Tammy Jo and her cohorts can't figure their way out of this, the whole town (more?) is a ticking time bomb.

BB picks up right after WBW ends, so the entire cast of characters from Frost's debut novel are poised to help-- and poised to be the same jerks they were in WBW. Kyle, Tammy's ex husband, is still there at the beginning of the book, so vile with doubt and machismo that he's talking about having Tammy committed for all of her chitchat about ghosts and witches and whatnot-- despite the fact that he spent the end of WBW fighting off werewolves (Yeah, he doesn't think they were real). But by the end of BB, Kyle grows and becomes far more sympathetic, and now I'm actually intrigued to find out how his relationship with Tammy Jo will develop in Book 3. The increasingly appealing Bryn Lyons begins BB as the savior for Tammy's damsel in distress, but as the book progresses, the two become much more evenly matched and start to take turns saving each other's hides. By the end, we're actually not sure who's saving whom.

I devoured BARELY BEWITCHED because Frost's writing is just so darned good. And I'm so happy to say that my sense is that this book is the stepping stone to more Southern Witch Books starring the very appealing Tammy Jo who is now really starting to be a heroine in her own right.

I happen to know that Kimberly Frost is just about as kick-ass, liberated, smart a chick as you can imagine. And that definitely clouds my reviews of her book. I want a Tammy Jo who's more like Kimberly. And I think now, we're starting to get one.

WHERE, WHERE THE HELL IS LOU? (Reading Elizabeth George)

2010-10-11T22:03:00.000-04:00

For a while I had a pretty good thing going here. And then around a year and a half ago, I just crapped out. I didn't crap out with my blogging-- I've been pretty regular about posting on Loueyville-- I just couldn't get back on track with my reading.

As many of you loyal readers-- if you still exist-- know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2008. Between the stress of the very "idea" of cancer and the subsequent chemo treatments, my mind became... a little fried. Turns out "Chemo Brain" is a very real thing. And some studies say it can last as long as five years. Chemo brain gnaws at your short term memory, makes you forgetful, and disrupts your ability to concentrate. My Mama has been calling me "the absent minded professor" since I was a wee lass; dump a steaming load of chemo brain on an already scattered soul... and it's kind of a whole mess of "what was I saying? Hey look at that pretty flower!"

Reading takes stamina. It takes focus. And if your short-term memory is shot, it's pretty hard to keep a story in your head once you put the book down.

After a while of trial and failure, I got tired of be frustrated all of the time, of having to go back ten or twenty pages every time I picked up a book. So for a long time, I just didn't read anything longer than a light short story.

But sometimes, after you've failed at something over and over, you have this glimmer of success. And whatever it was that gave you that feeling of succeeding?... Well, you tend to get kind of attached to that thing. If it made you feel good once, maybe it will make you feel good again...

... gosh, I sound like I'm talking about addiction. And maybe I sort of am.

That thing that made me feel like a successful reader again? Well, that thing was Elizabeth George.

After years of listening to Big Mama wax lovingly about George's characters, I decided to pick up her 1988 debut novel A GREAT DELIVERANCE. And something about those characters just clicked with me. And so I tried again with PAYMENT IN BLOOD. And I became hooked.

Last week, I turned the final page of George's August 2010 release THIS BODY OF DEATH. And that means I have read all eighteen books of George's Inspector Lyndley series... in a row... with almost nothing in between.

If that simple fact is not an endorsement of George's writing, I don't know what else to tell you.

Of course I do....

The first thing that everyone notes about Elizabeth George is that she's a woman from San Francisco who writes convincingly about a whole cast of characters, from various walks of life, who work in and around New Scotland Yard. "Convincingly" doesn't do George justice. Her grasp of all things British is extraordinary. Not only does she write "convincingly" about New Scotland Yard and middle and upper class Brits, she wrote an entire novel, WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER, from the perspective of and, largely in the dialect of, an inner-city, mixed-race ten year old.

But more extraordinary still, to me at least, is George's daring. (Mild spoiler alert... if you're familiar at all with this series, you've heard this before) A great number of books into the series, George dared to kill off one of the most beloved regular characters, in a numbingly tragic sort of way (I thought I was prepared for it... I could not have been prepared for it). And then she had the unmitigated gall to follow that book with a book that entirely abandoned the regular cast of characters to rewrite the murder of the beloved character from his/her killer's perspective! AND she made that killer not only sympathetic, but desperately tragic... perhaps even as tragic as the death that he/she had caused.

And finally... most extraordinary is the fact that this most recent book, THIS BODY OF DEATH, ranks among my favorites. Eighteen books into the series, and George is still hitting them out of the park. After you've read seventeen of George's books, you come to trust her unconditionally. Sure, for the first 500 pages or so, you have no idea why she seems to be recounting two separate and disconnected stories of graphic, horrible murders. But you know, you just know, that it's going to somehow gel before the end.

I hope George has eighteen more books in her. Certainly her characters' personal lives have nowhere near completed whatever journeys they seem to be on. And every new book-- there was one clunker in the bunch, but I forget which one it was, and I'm loathe to stigmatize any book in particular-- presents new, interesting crimes and new, interesting challenges for her cast of many. Yes, these are Lyndley novels-- or so they are called-- but I figure most female readers, at least, are as invested, if not more invested, in his train-wreck of a female partner, Barbara Havers. That being said, I'd be crushed if the series ended without solid resolution for at least five or six of the minor cast.

I've tried watching the PBS (BBC) series, but two hours doesn't do these books justice. Many viewers complain that the actor who plays Lyndley isn't handsome enough (uh, yeah he is) or that Havers is too pretty (yes, she is, but what a lame complaint). But for me, it's about the fact that George's novels average around 700 pages in paperback; that means I've spent upwards of 12,000 pages of my reading life with Elizabeth George's characters. Try replicating that on film.

So, that's where I've been, kids. I hope I am back. Here's to me finding my next Elizabeth George!

THE SHIPPING NEWS by Annie Proulx (re-read)

2009-06-04T01:20:00.003-04:00

More than anything else, I am happy to report that this is the second book that I have finished in four and a half days. I don't want to jinx myself or anything, but it may very well be that after a l-o-o-o-n-g bout of inability to read brought about by chemo brain... maybe the fog is lifting. I plowed through FIND ME, and I read THE SHIPPING NEWS in just a day and a half. This is exciting. This feels like... well, the old me.

I first read THE SHIPPING NEWS when it won the Pulitzer back in 1993. The nine-year-later re-read felt fresh and new. I remembered so little. I remembered the sad-sack Quoyle relocating his family to the old family home in Newfoundland. I remembered his job writing the shipping news at the Gunny Bird. I remembered the aunt, vaguely. And the two troublesome daughters. But mostly I remembered the house.

I'd forgotten how bleak the book is. I re-read it to prepare for my own summer adventures in Newfoundland, and now I am beset with worries about blood-draining black flies and roads that lead nowhere. I'd forgotten that while Quoyle is a champ of a father, he's struggles just to be a man. I'd forgotten how untamed the book made Newfoundland feel-- a place of reckless drunks, incestuous families, and small-minded folk.

I didn't forget that I loved the book when I first read it. And I am no less enchanted by it now. It's so spare. So echoes the close, sparse journalism that Quoyle writes. I am charmed by the space that the book dedicates to rumor and lore. The fact that Proulx allows characters to meander through stories and legends, that she devotes pages upon pages to stuff that only casts character onto the place and doesn't necessarily advance the story.

I've not read anything else by Proulx, but now, knowing she lives part time in Newfoundland, I will seek more out.

FIND ME by Carol O'Connell

2009-06-03T22:20:00.003-04:00

I'm not an expert on any given genre of fiction, let alone crime thrillers, but it just doesn't get much better than Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory novels. Mallory (because no one dares call her "Kathy") is a child criminal turned NYPD detective of the coldest, most calculating, enigmatic type. Only through her strange and often one-sided relationships with the people who love her (despite everything) do we get a peek at a tiny sliver of her inner workings.

FIND ME may be the best Mallory novel yet. This time around, Mallory is broken-- more broken than she naturally is. Her systems are falling apart, her guard is down, and she is far from home-- tracing two paths: the path of a piece of her past and the path of a prolific and gruesome serial child killer. Both roads lead her down Route 66.

The compelling foil to both of her goals is a caravan of parents of missing children, pulled together by an online psychotherapist of questionable character, tracing the same route seeking both their lost children and publicity for their sometimes decades-old cases. As the caravan grows from dozens to hundreds, the serial killer follows, and as the body count grows so too grows their hope that they're closer to finding out what happened to their kids.

Of course, Mallory is followed into this quest by the two men who love her most, her partner Riker and her... friend?... Charles Butler. But this time it's not because they care; it's because they want to get to the bottom of a death back in NYC. A death that occurred in Mallory's apartment, on the same day that she left town.

O'Connell's effortless omnicient point of view slides you into the minds of at least a dozen characters, major and minor. Getting to know the pschology behind these characters adds to the overall suspense and confusion (in a good way).

I devoured the book in two days. With the Mallory series it helps to start at the beginning but that's not by any means necessary. Dive right in with this one.

DEWEY by Vicky Myron with Brett Witter

2009-05-22T19:13:00.002-04:00

I have an awesome idea for an animal book. It's very vague; I'm still looking for inspiration. But the general gist of it would be this: the book would be about an animal like a giant tortoise or a parrot, a tortoise or a parrot that is inspiring and brave and gentle and kind... AND LIVES FOR-FRICKING-EVER. Seriously, either of those animals are bound to outlive their owners. And most importantly, those animals are bound to live all the way THROUGH the end of their memoirs. The book could end: "And as I finish this book, I look out the window at Timmy the Life-Saving Tortoise and watching carefully masticating a big bunch of kale, and I know that he has many, many years of good living ahead."

I'm just saying... I'd read it.

In a recent blog post I said that the fact that I was reading and enjoying DEWEY: THE SMALL-TOWN LIBRARY CAT WHO TOUCHED THE WORLD by Vicky Myron and Louisvillager Brett Witter was evidence that I am not as jaded and cynical as I maybe thought I was. And the fact that I enjoyed it all the way through confirmed that.

I didn't pick up the book because I am a pet lover. I have no pets of my own-- my lifestyle isn't condusive to pet mothering. But early readers of Loueyville may remember that the blog was named after a neighborhood stray cat, Louey, who hung out on my porch. After disappearing several times for months at a time, he got sick and had to be put down, and I was devastated. Now a neighbor's cat has claimed me as his part-time mother, and he comes and goes as he pleases. But that doesn't make me a cat person. (Methinks the lady dost protest too much... )

I picked up the book because shortly after we moved to Louisville, Roomie and I met Brett Witter and his family and some of their friends, and despite the fact that we all hit it off, we didn't really keep in touch. And then, two plus years later, DEWEY happened. And this really nice guy we had a really nice dinner with suddenly became a HUGE publishing success. So I had to get my hands on this book.

I admit, I was skeptical when I bought it. Just because something is a New York Times Bestseller doesn't mean it's any good (TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, anyone?). But within a page, I was assured that this was no soft-read, fluff, glorified Hallmark card. The introduction of the book, called "Welcome to Iowa," is such a magnificently rendered description of a very foreign-seeming place that if I were still teaching a writing class, I would give it to my students as a gorgeous example of "setting." I didn't hesistate to plow forth.

Around thirty pages into the book, after Dewey the library cat shows up on the scene as an abandoned, nearly dying, frozen kitten and is nursed back to health by Vicky and the other librarians, I started to worry. How the heck are the authors going to get 240+ more pages of cat life out of this story? Cat makes friends. Cat has adversaries. Cat has quirks. Is there really more than 240 pages worth of that stuff to tell?

No. There's not. But that's not what this book ends up being about. Cat friends, adversaries, and quirks are entertwined with Vicky's family's story and with the story of the small, suffering town of Spencer, Iowa. And those stories are just microcosms for the struggles of the farm belt and small manufacturing towns everywhere. Whether it's Wal-Mart showing up in town or the card catalogue being replaced by computers, change sometimes steamrolls over the town and sometimes pushes the town forward. But Dewey is the constant.

DEWEY is a lovely book. It is a soft-read, but it's not fluff. It's exceptionally well-written. If you love books or love the rural Midwest or love cats, the book has something for you.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neal Hurston (re-read x ??)

2009-05-11T23:18:00.002-04:00

Always a very satisfying read. So much beautiful language.

Once upon a time, a beau of Lou fell into disfavor with her. As "punishment," she asked him to find her favorite line from THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD and mail it to her. Oh yes. Snail mail. It took him three or four times, but he was eventually welcomed back into her good graces when he sent her a letter that began (minus ZNH's vernacular):

"Baby, you've got the keys to the kingdom."

Ah the good ol' days, when Mama was able to (right or wrong) make the menfolk jump through a few innocuous hoops. Thanks for the memories, ZNH.

Louisvillager Powers Activate! Form of: Books for LFPL

2009-05-11T23:16:00.001-04:00

What are the odds you read Lou Reads and not Loueyville.com? But even if there are one or two of you, here's a cross post from the motherblog:

I just love love love that Louisville is so full of fantastic people and that I’m getting to know so many of them.

The wise and lovely Ms. Michelle over at Consuming Louisville is urging her readers to support the Louisville Free Public Libraries with her: “Libraries are Free, But Books Aren’t” drive. The LFPL has established an Amazon wish list just for this cause.

In the rather unlikely event that you read my little blog, and not Consuming Louisville, I would love love love it if you would help support Michelle’s drive and support the LFPL by purchasing a book off of the wish list.

Mama’s a bit broke these days—even this whole blogging hobby that I have is starting to get expensive—but how can I not support this cause? I was on my way to the end of the list to purchase an adult book (if you want to buy adult books, they’re on pages 8 & 9—and I don’t mean “adult books” like the Adult Bookstore across the river means it), and I discovered that the LFPL was in need of one of my favorite books as a child: Blueberries for Sal by Robert “Make Way for Ducklings” McCloskey.

Totally reminds me of Nana and G-pa Lou, and their old beach house by the New England shore. Sniffles.

Blueberries for Sal, it is for me. What is it for you?

WOULD-BE WITCH by Kimberly Frost

2009-04-18T10:49:00.004-04:00

WOULD-BE WITCH needs a minor "friend full disclosure." While I don't know Kimberly all that well, we travel in the same circles. Just FYI.

A reviewer compared Frost's first novel to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, and I totally see it. Tammy Jo Trask, Frost's "would-be witch," is sassy and funny and quick to whip out the feminine wiles to get what she needs or wants.

The Trask family isn't the only family of powerful witches in the tiny town of Duval, TX-- in fact, Duval may be to witches what Cabot Cove was to murderers. There's also the Lyons family, including hunky Bryn Lyons who may be a bad ass good guy or may be the bad guy. And werwolves. And a ghost of a witch who lives in a locket. And gay vampires. And...

The story revolves around the theft of the previously mentioned locket. As luck would have it for Tammy Jo, who didn't inherit her family's serious witch mojo-- we think--, the powerful members of her family are out of town and not due back for a while. Not only that, but she's just been fired and she's dead broke and her ex-husband is all up in her grill. So it's a bad time, but it's up to her to get the locket-- and her family ghost, Edie-- back. With the help of a truly awesome kitty cat (my favorite character in the book) and the suspicious aid of Bryn Lyons, Tammy Jo gets tangled up in a dangerous subculture (for lack of a better word) as the hidden magical world of Duval spins out of control and begins to threaten the safety (and ignorance) of the town's non-magical citizens.

Frost has an excellent sense of humor-- great comedic timing. That's the best part of this book. I'm not the ideal audience for chick lit/romance. Most of the reviewers of Frost's book, both on Amazon and on her own site, say that the love triangle between Tammy Jo, Bryn, and Tammy Jo's ex-husband Kyle is "hot." I found her damsel-in-distress-ness kind of unappealing after a while, and both men in her life made me a bit squeamish. (Especially Kyle, who is wicked pushy and alpha-male-y and doesn't even believe in the ghost in the locket or all this witch stuff-- why would she marry this guy in the first place, and why the heck is she still schtupping him??)

But this book bummed me out in the way that Christopher Moore's books sometimes bum me out. I love Christopher Moore, and I love the humor in WOULD-BE WITCH. CM's books are must-reads, but their female characters are total stereotypes more often than not. Frost's writing rocks; I just wish Tammy Jo was a character I could sink my teeth into (bad vampire pun).

WOULD-BE WITCH is the first book in a series, and my hope is that as Tammy Jo develops as a character, she'll whip out her inner ocelot and start saving herself a bit more often. (And she can start by saving herself from her jerkoff ex-husband!!)

Bouchercon 2009 in Indy

2009-02-06T18:31:00.000-05:00

Check out the post at Loueyville.com

THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CYPRESS PARISH by Elise Blackwell

2009-02-06T15:21:00.002-05:00

For obvious reasons, I am both drawn to and repelled by novels about hurricanes, especially those about Katrina. I could barely get through chapter one of James Lee Burke's TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN. I first cracked the spine while sneaking a cigarette break during lunch while teaching on the campus of Skidmore College a couple of summers ago. And my response to the first few pages was bodily, visceral, and dramatic. Self-preservation made me close the book before I got through more than two or three pages; I knew if I kept reading, I wouldn't be able to go back to my class full of fourteen and fifteen year olds and roll onward with Hamlet.

And my response late last year to CATEGORY FIVE by TJ McGregor was: "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."

But with UNNATURAL HISTORY, here we have a book explicitly dealing with Katrina, and... nothing. Really.

My first reaction to this book was to think that the Katrina sections felt forced. They are the "present day" of the book during which the protagonist, Louis, waits for Katrina to hit and reflects upon the 1927 Mississippi River flood/levee blasting, the locus of the main plot of the novel. The Katrina sections bookend the 1927 plotline; like in the recent movie, Benjamin Buttons, these moments felt like an afterthought-- dry and emotionless (clearly F.Scott Fitzgerald did not address a coming hurricane in his short story from which Buttons takes its inspiration). Anyone who lived in any proximity to the Katrina landfall knows that those moments before the storm struck were anything but emotionless.

My instincts may have been right about these sections. According to a review from the Washington Post: "When Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, Elise Blackwell was deep into a novel about the flood that struck Louisiana in 1927. 'This still spooks me,' she says, and that uncanny repetition of disaster forced her to revise what she'd written."

(nb. I am not criticizing the idea of revising a work in process to reflect a current event; I tried to include Katrina in the work that I had in progress-- it's a slog, and I don't know if it will work. But you have to be honest to the event, give it some time to shift around and find its proper level. Note that the uberprolific Dean Koontz has taken more than four years to produce the third in his series of modern Frankenstein novels, set in New Orleans. His delay was said to be because he didn't want to unleash any more destruction on New Orleans-- even fictional destruction. But it also took him time to figure out how to handle Katrina. My sense is that Blackwell didn't take enough of that time.)

In 1927, Louis lives in the fictional Cypress Parish, the son of the lumber town's Superintendent-- the most important man in town. As he grows up and watches town politics and the relationships between his father and officials on both a local and a statewide level, Louis begins to understand that his dad is just a small fish. There are other ponds too, as there always have been in renegade rural Louisiana, organized (and disorganized) crime and labor. It's not until Louis gets a job working as a driver for one of those shady characters that he begins to see all these layers of government (I use that term loosely) and how they work.

There's a love story. A lovely story about a local painter. Some Southern Gothic over-the-top tall-tales. But none of those really resonanted with me. My favorite parts of the book were those that described the local flora and fauna and other threats (leprosy!) and were meant to mimic the tone of a Natural History book. Louis, you see, is fond of Pliny.

All-in-all, this book felt flat, emotionless, stagnant. It all felt like Pliny. Not a book about a coming flood, but a book where the waters felt still, indeed.

MOTEL OF THE STARS by Karen McElmurray

2009-01-23T15:45:00.003-05:00

Jason Sanderson is a very sad man. He has a sad job (repo man). His family life is sad-- first wife and only child are both dead. His current home life is sad-- he's married to a woman who neither understands him (keeps dragging him to new age-y couples groups) nor his loss (stages a horribly gauche and insensitive sort of grief intervention on the 10th anniversary of the death of the son-- perhaps the most brilliantly written and upsetting scene in the book).

Lory Llewellyn is a very sad woman. She has a sad job (accountant for her skeezy step dad's eponymous hotel). Her family life is sad-- mom ran away and stepdad is, as I said, skeezy, and an alcoholic. Her current home life is sad-- almost ten years ago her lover died in a helicopter crash and she's never recovered. She's a cutter. She's reclusive.

The parallel stories of these two depressed and depressing folk who share their love and loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason's son and Lory's lover, run in elegant and poetic prose until they converge (perhaps inevitably, but somehow the convenience is tempered by how poetic the whole book is). Infused with and often critical of both quack spirituality and the "real" deal, MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES is an exploration of grief, of family, of dependancy.

This is a sad book. It will make you hurt. But the writing is so extraordinarily good that you'll enjoy that pain.

This is McElmurray's second novel. The first, STRANGE BIRDS IN THE TREE OF HEAVEN, was also a gorgeously crafted book, but it was a little harder to follow, a little more abstract. MOTEL has been very well received. One blogger named it her novel of the year.

McElmurray was born and raised in Kentucky. Her book is published by the local Sarabande Books as part of the Linda Bruckheimer (who I keep confusing with Linda Wurthhiemer) Series in KY Literature (click here) -- which I'd never heard of until I came across this book.

And she's reading tonight (with Sean Hill and Elizabeth Bradfield) at 7:30pm at the Frankfort Avenue Carmichael's. Check it out and pick up the book.

TWILIGHT by Stephanie Meyer

2008-11-26T00:31:00.002-05:00

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.

CATEGORY FIVE by TJ MacGregor

2008-11-15T01:34:00.004-05:00

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?

PURPLE CANE ROAD by James Lee Burke

2008-10-13T23:59:00.001-04:00

WINTER HOUSE by Carol O'Connell

2008-09-21T02:00:00.002-04:00

Always fantastic.

THE MOOR by Laurie R. King

2008-09-07T11:51:00.002-04:00

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.

FOOL ON THE HILL by Matt Ruff (re-read)

2008-09-05T03:01:00.001-04:00

Still amazing even the fourth time around.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS-- Sara Gruen

2008-08-29T14:49:00.001-04:00

THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS by Ann Patchett

2008-08-29T01:34:00.000-04:00

NATURE GIRL by Carl Hiaasen

2008-08-26T23:49:00.002-04:00

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.

THE BOOK OF MARY by Laurie R. King

2008-08-26T23:48:00.000-04:00

A MONSTEROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN by Laurie King

2008-08-20T18:24:00.002-04:00

THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE by Laurie R. King

2008-08-20T17:54:00.002-04:00

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.

CANCER VIXEN by Marisa Acocella Marchetto

2008-08-06T14:57:00.001-04:00

Graphic novel. Sex in the City meets breast cancer minus Samantha's pink hair.

GREAT WHITE by Peter Benchley

2008-08-06T14:56:00.001-04:00

Not really about a shark...

But about my hometown in Connecticut under a different name.

ONE FOR THE MONEY by Janet Evanovich

2008-08-06T14:55:00.002-04:00

The first of the Stephanie Plum novels.

DEEP SIX by Randy Striker (Randy Wayne White)

2008-08-06T14:53:00.003-04:00

Re-published early thriller/mystery from South Florida's Randy Wayne White writing under the pseudonym Striker.

CHARLIE ALL NIGHT by Jennifer Crusie

2008-08-06T14:52:00.000-04:00

Early romance novel from chick-lit writer.

Lou's going to cheat: Book Dump

2008-08-06T14:51:00.001-04:00

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.

THE NAME OF THE WIND by Patrick Rothfuss

2008-08-06T14:50:00.001-04:00

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.

BLANKETS by Craig Thompson

2008-07-25T18:13:00.003-04:00

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.

MAXIMUM RIDE (series) by James Patterson (first three books of series)

2008-07-24T23:26:00.004-04:00

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.

BIG MONEY by Jack Getze

2008-07-13T14:36:00.003-04:00

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.

HIT LIST by Lawrence Block

2008-05-27T01:02:00.002-04:00

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 Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

2008-04-14T22:21:00.002-04:00

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.

March by Geraldine Brooks

2008-04-14T20:22:00.000-04:00

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.

Bonk by Mary Roach

2008-04-13T09:12:00.002-04:00

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.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

2008-04-13T08:50:00.001-04:00

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.”

Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie

2008-01-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

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.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

2008-01-29T18:33:00.000-05:00

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.

Lou's been blurbed

2008-01-29T18:14:00.000-05:00

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.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

2008-01-29T17:46:00.003-05:00

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.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

2008-01-29T17:13:00.000-05:00

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.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2008-01-28T17:42:00.001-05:00

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:

"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.
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."

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.

Did Lou stop reading?

2007-09-07T22:40:00.000-04:00

No. Lou just got lazy with posting. That's part of it, at least. In the intervening months:

I started The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. I picked this up because his new book came out and the reviews fairly uniformly trashed it, but reminded readers how good Ocean Park had been. I'd always meant to read this because my aunt and uncle have a summer home maybe 1/4 mile from Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, MA, and I know the area like the back of my hand. And while references to Linda Jean's restaurant and the Flying Horses kept me compelled on a personal level, I found the book tiring. It could have been half as long, in my opinion. As a long-winded, rambling writer myself, it's a bit hypocritical for me to say: but enough with the explanations & descriptions already, Carter! I gave up 3/4 of the way through, not because I was bored, per se, although I was, but because I put the book down long enough that I'd lost the thread.

I'm working my way through the Harry Potters starting at Book One. To me this is a luxury, a treat, an indulgence. I'm on Goblet of Fire right now, and I should finish that this weekend. What a pleasure it is to see that JK mentioned things in Chapter One of Book One that would become resoundingly important in the final book. Brilliance! And charming to revisit the fact that Books 1 & 2 were short enough that they could be tucked, inconspicuously, into a pocketbook.

I read Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying for school. Finished it in a little more than one sitting. Tragic, heavy book... one where it takes you clear til the end to actually feel sympathy for any of the characters. But what an impact. I was stunned, disappointed, when I met with my seven 9th grade advisees this week and found out that they all thought it was b-o-r-i-n-g! But to my surprise (and honestly renewing my faith that 14 year old girls are still GIRLS) they were way put off by the somewhat explicit sex scenes!

I also re-read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne for school. Still a great book-- although not according to my students-- but I see the dead spaces, in my opinion, for what they are-- places where a genius short-story author stretches to make a short-story into a novel. I'll take "Young Goodman Brown" or "The Minister's Black Veil" any day.

So that's my skinny-- still reading, just reporting less. Will try to be better.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

2007-07-26T21:53:00.002-04:00

Chabon writes as though he is crafting poetry, not prose. That’s not to say that his work is poetic, per se, but that the art of his work is in the fact that it reads as though every word he sets to the page is a deliberate and much-deliberated choice. Thick with metaphor and simile, his writing makes the reader feel as though they’re in the hands of a author who lets nothing happen by chance, who makes no mistakes, without feeling intimidated.

You don’t have to “work” to read Chabon’s writing. It is not slow. It is not confusing. It is, simply, gorgeous.

And The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is as gorgeous as anything Chabon has written. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ranks in my top five favorite books ever, and this book is only slightly less astonishingly good. I struggle to put my finger on the difference between the two. Perhaps it is that K&C had an epic quality, or perhaps I just connected more deeply with the material because I enjoy comic books and NYC history.

I mean that not to diminish The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in the slightest. Nor to suggest that this book lacks an epic quality. But here the epic revolves around politics and culture, and not an individual.

Remarkable on every level, this book, like K&C showcases the depth of Chabon’s knowledge of Jewish history, knowledge that he uses to build the foundation of an alternate history, one in which Sitka, Alaska—not Israel— becomes the temporary homeland of displaced Jews post WWII. Sitka is not meant to be a permanent home, and now, in 2007, the territory is set to revert back to an American holding—“Alaska for Alaskans” is a political rally cry of the day. The looming reversion will mean another exodus for the “Frozen Chosen,” who have few, if any, viable options.

“It’s a strange time to be a Jew.” The refrain appears again and again, spoken by character after character.

At the center of the story is Meyer Landsman, divorced, alcoholic, rogue cop who lives in a flop house straight out of a noir novel. A murder has occurred in his run-down hotel home, and just when you think that the book will be a noir mystery that happens to be set in troubling times, the plot spins wide and reaching and suddenly the thriller embraces international politics, terrorism, mysticism, the second (or third) coming of the Messiah, and even the End Times.

Like any noir detective, Landsman is sympathetic in his flaws. But more than most iconic gumshoes, he’s loveable. His greatest sorrows haunt him and move him to tears on a regular basis. He’s an asshole who takes advantage of his kinder, more centered friends, but does not do so without regret. The tiny thread of a love story in the novel is among the most believable and moving that I’ve encountered of late.

My only complaint, and it’s not a complaint so much as a regret, is that Yiddish, the language of the Sitkans, plays such a central role. If I understood even rudiments of Yiddish, I might have found the book even funnier and even more tender.

As I read the last chapter, I snuck a peek at how many pages were left and saw that there were but three. I stopped reading and cursed Chabon for creating such a dense and complicated book—there was no way he could finish it in a satisfying way in three pages.

I was wrong. I am satisfied. Satisfied in that any true, tie up all loose ends, ending would create an impossible Die Hard-ish fairy tale of a thriller. His (again satisfying) ending is messy and frustrating. But the situation is messy and frustrating. Any neat ending would have felt fraudulent.

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

2007-07-26T21:53:00.001-04:00

At 2am EST on July 22, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 26 hours after its release. There are no true spoilers in this entry, and any pseudo-spoilers will come with warnings.

Roommate was in NYC for the release, and by midday on the 20th, he was text messaging me to let me know that crowds had already gathered. I headed downtown Saratoga Springs around 7pm and picked up my wristband from Borders. The clerk said that my green wristband would allow me into the green line and then festivities began at nine. I parked myself at the bookstore across the street—Uncommon Grounds—to do some grading. The location gave me the opportunity to check out the Borders line whenever I went out to grab a smoke.

By 10pm, a throng had gathered, but even by 11 or so, it hadn’t increased. When I headed over at 1130, I felt pretty confident that, although Roommate had been telling me that there were thousands gathered in Times Square, Saratoga would be an in-and-out venture. What I hadn’t realized was that the crowd outside was just catching some air… inside it was breast-to-back claustrophobia.

Had the clerk done me a favor when bestowing me with a green wristband? I’ll never know. But after fighting my way through the crowds, I found that the green line was the shortest. I took my place behind a cloaked mom and a daughter dressed as Crookshanks and held my precarious ground. The other colored lines were double the green even then and expanded to fill the small store. When green built up behind me it grew slowly—us green folks were the lucky ones.

The store had raffle drawings and bingo. I paid little attention to either. A handsome man, 31 year old ad salesman, took the green space behind me. He reeked of liquor and made loud jokes about the costumed attendees. He will remain an enigma to me, as he was brutal and yet… still in line for his own copy. At one point I spun around and said, “You DO realize that this is book meant for kids, right?” He admitted to being a Star Wars geek and having dressed in costume for a premier or two. And so, I gave him a bit of a hard time. My elbow bumped him hard when I was taking off my sweatshirt in the oppressive heat, and when I apologized, he said, “I’ll never complain about a pretty girl taking her clothes off in front of me.” He (I did catch his name, but have forgotten it) seemed rather intent on picking me up, until I flatly told him that nothing short of nuclear war was going to stop me from starting to read HP as soon as I bought it.

So, strange crowd indeed. I admired Crookshanks’s “witches brew” necklace and she disappeared and returned with one for me. I made small talk with drunk guy, and he honked his horn at me and screamed out the window when he drove by me (he shouldn’t have been driving) on my way back to the car. Next to me were parents—locals—in line so their wee ones on the balcony wouldn’t be crushed by the hoards on the selling floor.

Green magic worked in my favor and I walked out at 12:21 am with my prize. Headed straight back to my dorm lodging at Skidmore College where my box o’wine awaited me. And by 12:45, I’d cracked open both the box and the book.

Read until the wine made me sleepy at 4am-ish. Woke at my 8am alarm and cursed myself for not shutting it off. I considered continuing to read in my bed at 8, but fought it and then couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay awake for two hours, thinking about the book. And I came up with what I thought would be the perfect fate for Harry. This may be a spoiler but I promise that I won’t tell you if I was right or not so don’t finish this paragraph if you don’t even want any ideas: My thought was it would be perfect if Harry survived and somehow became the first, really permanent Defense of the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts.

Again, this was just a musing of mine when I was less than 200 pages into the book.

Anyway, finally re-slept at 10 and woke at 12:30… and pretty much read until I finished at 2am.

Did laundry, had lunch, got sushi, and did a little shopping, but other than that my day was devoted to finishing the book. Got a bit of a sunburn reading on my porch. And just after I finished, and just after I started this entry, I was confronted by a curious skunk not two feet away from me. Luckily his claws skittered on the concrete and I had a little time to think, but he was so cute it was all I could do to not reach out and pet him.

Final verdict: Best book out of the seven. 750-some pages of nail-biting suspense. Gorgeous and moving wrapping up of the mythology. I GET that it is over, and I accept that.

It did feel a bit slow for a while after around 100 pages, but so much was revealed during a time of inaction. Connections unearthed. Revelations uncovered.

In the end, the mythology feels, well, done. And well done.

Semi-pseudo-spoiler alert: I’ll never for the life of me know what JK Rowling meant when she said that “Two die.” Bull SHIT! I can’t even begin to imagine what her qualifications for “two” were. The death toll in the book is considerable and there were few deaths that didn’t bring tears to my eyes.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore

2007-07-20T23:05:00.000-04:00

Christopher Moore used to rank way up there on my list of favorite contemporary writers, but the last couple of books that I have read by him have left me feeling rather-- eh. I used to feel like he was a more literary Carl Hiaasen, whom I greatly admire, but, with the exception of the extraordinary book Lamb, my more recent reading has rendered Moore no more than on par with Hiaasen (although his name is considerably easier to spell).

After reading the book, I'm still not sure who the "sequined love nun" is. I assume it is Beth, the Sky Priestess, although she ain't a nun, never did anything remotely nunly, and only appeared in sequins once. The book does take place on an island in Micronesia, so the Island part is accurate.

Love Nun is the story of Tucker Case, a womanizing screw-up pilot who begins the novel with his biggest screw up ever. While drunk, he crashes the plane of his Mary Kay-like employer, injuring the hooker passenger, and ramming a lever on the instrument panel through his naked love pump not once but twice. Broken, unemployed, and impotent. Ain't no way to go through life.

Mysterious circumstances land him on the island of Alualu, home of the Shark People and a cargo cult centering around an American WWII pilot/Jesus figure named Vincent and the beautiful naked Sky Princess painted on the nose of his bomber. An American missonary doctor and his wife have hired Tuck as their pilot and offered to pay him so generously that their intentions can only be criminal. But when he arrives (on a 20-foot boat with a cross-dressing navigator and a talking fruitbat during a monsoon) he finds that they have appropriated the native's mythology and Beth has assumed the identity of the Sky Princess.

It's fun, it's funny, and the writing is still excellent. But Moore's usual semi-magical realism feels more like a stretch in this one.

Waiting for Harry

2007-07-20T22:55:00.000-04:00

It's 10:56pm EST. Do you have your wristband?

Lou is out of town, but she ordered her Harry Potter online from a bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY. She's in the green line. And she's been very, very, very careful not to read a single spoiler.

Getting the book, going back to her local digs where she has a box of wine waiting for her and the whole place to herself.

Long live Harry! I hope.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (re-read)

2007-07-04T18:59:00.000-04:00

Another one of Roommate's ease-into-fantasy purchases. A much better one in my opinion. A classic, in fact.

I first read Good Omens: The Nice And Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch back in the mid-90's, in college, while lying on my single futon in the 6' X 8' bedroom of my fourth floor walk-up in Harlem. Ah, the good ol' days. I was working in the East Village at St. Mark's Comics and had fallen in love with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of graphic novels. Good Omens lore-- substantiated by the authors' notes in the back of the book-- is that the story began as a short story that Gaiman started and couldn't finished; the young journalist sent it to Terry Pratchett-- already doing well as an author-- who promptly ignored it for a year. When he dug it out again, he said that he couldn't finish it, per se, but he could imagine what happened next...

This seamlessly co-authored book supposes that the Antichrist has been born, Armageddon is in a few days, and what would happen if the agents of Hell and Heaven on earth decide that they just don't feel like bringing about the end of the world?

Aziraphale (heaven) and Crowley (hell) have been adversaries for millenia, but when the End Times are just days away, they decide that it is humanity itself, and the constant struggle between good and evil, that has made life (such as it is) worth living. Should the Rapture come, the War would begin, a Victor would be declared-- where's the fun in that?

Hilarious, along a distinctly British humor/absudist vein, and stunningly well written, Good Omens exceeds any novel written by either novelist alone (and I do LOVE both Gaiman and Pratchett's works). The only complaint I can imagine is the sometimes cluttered-feeling huge cast of characters. There's Anethema, the modern witch. Adam Young, 11 year old AntiChrist. Warlock, who's supposed to be the AntiChrist. Agnes Nutter, the author of the titular prophecies. The four bikers of the Apocolypse. Several witchfinders. A bevy of rebellious children. The list of major characters takes up two full pages.

The authors notes mentions the lack of a sequel to a book that just cries out for a sequel and alludes that one may very well be forthcoming. Part of my holds my breath, and part of me worries. While Pratchett has sucessfully produced close to twenty books in the Discworld series-- all of which that I've read have been great-- and Gaiman kept the Sandman franchise fresh until the end, I was disappointed by Anansi Boys, the sequel to Gaiman's stupendous American Gods. There's nothing like holding one's breath for a sequel only to have it let you down (she says as she counts down the days to the next Harry Potter and whispers a tiny prayer for brilliance).

Storm Front (Book 1 of the Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher

2007-06-26T13:56:00.000-04:00

I snagged this book from Roommate before he had a chance to read it. He’s not a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but he wants to start reading those genres (“on his own terms,” he says, and I’m not sure what that means). The Dresden files appealed to him because they’re urban fantasy, set in a Chicago where you can find a wizard in the phone book (although only one) and where the CPD has seen fit to create (although understaff, apparently) a special unit to investigate the more unexplainable crimes.

The Dresden Files appealed to me because I knew they’d been turned into a Sci-Fi Channel show, and with the demise of the Sopranos, Studio 60, Jericho (or maybe not) and several other “investment” shows, I have some TiVo space for a new one. And so far, I’ve had good luck with Sci-Fi.

Maybe the television show is better. I was fairly unimpressed with Storm Front, which read muddy and odd, like Butcher had a sloppy editor or perhaps one who’d read several Dresden novels and therefore wasn’t as critical of the holes in the world that Butcher created. I didn’t buy in from the get go.

Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden morphs from noir-ish private eye to a Dumbledore-style wizard replete with staff and wand, and the mash-up never feels natural. He’s funny. He’s attractive in a Snape sort of way. I’d date him. But I just don’t “believe in” him. And both fantasy and noir conventions abound. The plucky (and short—always short) female copy exiled to the weirdo crimes division; Murphy’s a cardboard cut-out of the chick cop with the chip on her shoulders and a soft underbelly. Harry has a spirit helper, a pervy troublemaker named Bob, who reads like just about every bumbling Igor. Although Harry is undoubtedly one of the “good guys,” he’s misunderstood by the White Council (the magic guardians) and they have their eyes on him (in the form of the gruff Morgan), and he’s always getting in trouble. Again, is any magical hero ever understood and supported by the powers-that-be? (See another famous Harry)

Some of the plot feels fresh and interesting (a crack-like drug that gives junkies the sort of Third Sight normally only afforded those with supernatural proclivities) and some… not so much (the pizza-loving spirit informant? Too easy.)

Maybe the books get better. I’m already skeptical of TV the series. The cast looks like a Bennetton ad, even though the book creates fairly white-bread characters. Harry is wayyyyy more attractive than he needs to be, likewise Murphy (who’s Hispanic in the series and fairly Irish and stout in the book). Morgan, who has a Highlander-style sword and ponytail in the book, is black and hot. I admire Sci-Fi’s consistent attention to presenting multicultural casts; I’m more freaked by the babe factor.

There are nine books in the series. I’ll probably pick up one more before I make a final decision. There are plenty of serieses that get good a couple books in.

Briga-DOOM!: A Kate London Mystery by Susan Goodwill

2007-06-22T00:40:00.000-04:00

See the full disclosure statement from Getze's Big Numbers. I don't know Goodwill as well, but she's part of the same posse.

You know, I am pretty sure if I caught my future husband, the mayor, caught with his pants down making whoopie to the town bitch, I would probably mow down his porta-potty with my golf cart, too. I'm just hoping that my local judge wouldn't send me to anger management with the off-her-gourd Dr. Al.

So what if Mayor Ass turns up dead in the trunk of my car, right? I can handle it. And so can Kate London.

I really enjoyed this breezy mystery featuring Kate London, newly returned to home town Mud Lake to be closer to Aunt Kitty. Kitty, formerally a B-movie bombshell, is the real star of the show with her Kool-Aid hair colored hair topped with a fez, her passion for musical theater and bongos, and her side-kick, the equally whacky Verna.

Goodwill is a great writer with an excellent knack for humor and pushing the limits of "just how bad can it get?" The book is really well crafted and moves along at a strong clip. The interwoven mysteries had me guessing until the end. I wish the love-connection hadn't been made so early on, especially because this is a series and I know the second book is in the can. I'd be more than willing to wait through two or more new books before Kate gets her Man.

I think I am supposed to refrain from calling this chick-lit, but it's hard to not go there. If Kate mentioned her Jimmy Choos one more time. . . but see, that's just a personal peeve of mine. I dig some good ol' chick-lit now and again, and this was more mystery than girl fare, but Lordy, am I the only woman in the world who's happy as can be in Payless?

Damn damn damn Carrie Bradshaw and the fact that she made "loves expensive shoes" shorthand for being feminine. Kate had it in spades before the shoe obsession.

Lou Used to Read a Lot More

2007-06-03T22:44:00.001-04:00

Nothing like a trip down memory lane to make you both weepy and thrilled.

Lou used to read a lot more. Back before Katrina turned my brain into an ADD-plagued California Raisin, reading was pretty much my raison-d'etre. For a year after Katrina, I merely stacked books on my bedside table as I started and abandoned them. It's really only been in the last six months or so that I've been "able" to read.

And that's where Lou Reads comes in. Once upon a time, I used to keep a log (before blogs) of every book I read. Mostly, I did it for myself, but I also published it on my old school's website so that my technology-crazed students could see the handiwork of an old-fashioned reader. Now that I'm reading again, I thought I would pick up where I left off-- in a more public and more thorough form.

So I've revisited and published my old reading list for your skimming pleasure. I stopped counting at 100 books. And what a gas it was to revisit my entries from some of my favorite books like Empire Falls and Life of Pi and Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Re-reads of classics like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Princess Bride. Surprises like Chang and Eng and A Year of Wonders.

Every book stirs a memory of a time and place in my life. I read the bulk of Love Warps the Mind a Little in the bed of the man that I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. I bought Lady Gregory's Toothbrush in a small bookstore in Sligo, Ireland. The only books I was able to devour post-Katrina were genre pulp fiction like Tom Corcoran's Gumbo Lindo and Dean Koontz's Frankenstein.

And so it goes, right?

Today would have been the 81st birthday of Allan Ginsberg. When I was a fresh freshman in college, I tried to join the college radio station staff (and now, with my crazy passion for all things NPR, I'm so sorry that I wigged out). My first assignment: to interview Ginsberg at after a reading he was doing at the Blue Note with Ray Manzarak of the Doors. Ginsberg attended my college and was a rather unhappy alum. When I approached him with my tape recorder, he granted the interview, but proceeded to answer every question with, well, let's just say the kind of answers that one cannot broadcast on any radio station. He was, in short, mean and vulgar. After listening to the absolutely unusable interview the following morning, I went to the station, turned in my press card and my tape recorder and called it a day.

So I've never been a big fan.

Today, a local guy I vaguely know decided to make it his mission to travel around to all the coffee shops in the neighborhood and read Ginsberg poetry in honor of the birthday. He'd studied with Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets. It annoyed me at the time-- I was on the phone with my roommate trying to get the skinny on why his stepfather had been admitted to the hospital with an egregiously high heart rate-- but in retrospect, it's just another reason that Louisville is a neat place. That being said, my still-bruised-after-fifteen-years ego wanted to ask the guy, "But was he mean to you?"

I'm still not a big fan. After having spent this year teaching American Lit, I realize all the more that he doesn't wear well over time. Whitman sang the body-- even the naughty bits-- with more worship. Thoreau actually built the cabin in the woods rather than just dreamed of it. Even Bukowski, who was a contemporary, got to the piss and shit of mundane life in a more honest way.

But happy birthday and RIP anyway. Any poet who inspires people to spend their day wandering town like a troubadour is all right by me.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
-- From "America" by Allan Ginsberg

Big Numbers by Jack Getze

2007-06-03T22:16:00.000-04:00

Full disclosure: I’ve known Jack Getze for around five years. He’s a dear friend for whose writing career I’ve been a big cheerleader. I can’t even pretend to be unbiased about this book. Heck, I’m even mentioned in the acknowledgements. “Lou Reads” isn’t meant to be a forum to promote my friends’ books, but I just got back from dropping in at Writers Retreat Workshop, where I caught up with a bunch of folks, many of whom have published books since I last saw them. So I’ll most likely be tackling some Friends-of-Lou’s books in the coming weeks.

I’m still a little unclear as to what a “full-boat grin” is. I just Googled it and came up with a blog entry about Big Numbers. Indiana Jones has his whip and Luke Skywalker has his light saber, but for Austin Carr, the hero (or antihero) of Jack Getze’s first book, Big Numbers, the “full-boat Carr grin” is his weapon of choice.

(Is it full-boat, as in a fishing charter captain’s grin when he’s happy to have a full boat? Or full-boat, as in the grin’s so big it looks like a boat? Full boat almost sounds like a poker term.)

Big Numbers opens with Carr in trouble. Big trouble. On a boat duct-taped to a fishing pole with a 600 lb giant tuna at the other end of the line kind of trouble. Mr. Blabbermouth apparently wants to kill Carr with a bit of panache. Just as Carr’s about to go sailing over the rail, we flash back to the events leading up to his big nap with the fishies. And no surprise—it’s hard-boiled thriller, after all—it’s a redhead.

Carr is a down-on-his luck Jersey Shore stockbroker who’s $58K behind on his child support payments. His wife has issued a restraining order until Carr can make the payments. In the meantime, he’s living out of a rusty camper in the parking lot of Luis’s Mexican restaurant—a convenient back yard for a man who likes his tequila shots doubled and in the morning—when he finds out that his “monster” client is terminally ill and has a red-headed knockout girlfriend who would rather not wait for her inheritance. Trouble ensues.

One can only hope that Carr has hellagood health insurance with Shore Securities. He makes no fewer than four trips to the hospital during the course of the book.

Big Numbers is funny and dark. Getze has a ton of fantastic zinger lines that make me so proud to know him. I have a soft spot for assholes, and Carr is a narrator who is both conflicted and decidedly wrong-headed (and downright shitty) at times. And while to some degree he’s almost a caricature (Getze cites Bugs Bunny and Vince Vaughn as inspirations), more often his serious and nearly-fatal flaws make him feel real.

It’s a quick read, a perfect beach book. I read the last half in a single sitting. And—I say this with no bias at all—Big Numbers was published by a relatively small press and the book is not getting the attention it deserves. It’s easily as good as most of the series mystery/thrillers that my family devours by the dozens. The book looks deceptively like the self-published crap you find in local bookstores. It’s a shame; what’s inside is first-rate stuff.

Visit Jack Getze's website.

A Dirty Job: A Novel by Christopher Moore

2007-06-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

There’s no way in Hell Mike Rowe would take on Charlie Asher’s dirty job, not even if there was a free baseball cap involved. Which there isn’t. In fact the only things Charlie seems to get for free in exchange for his services as a “Death Merchant” are a couple of hellhounds to protect his toddler Sophie from the Sewer Harpies, a copy of the Great Big Book of Death, and some excellent deals on the estates of dead people for his thrift store in San Francisco.

And actually, with the exception of a few bloody run-ins with the Sewer Harpies and various ancient incarnations of Death, the job isn’t all that dirty in the Mike Rowe sense of the word.

Christopher Moore remains among my favorite contemporary writers. As a reader (and a writer) who surfs between literary and genre, I am satisfied by Moore on both fronts. Many people can tell an engaging and amusing genre story, but few can tell one with such literary panache.

I haven’t read the entire Moore catalogue, but A Dirty Job has taken its place at #2 on my list of Moore books, just under Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. You don’t get much better than Lamb for linked humor and profundity, and while A Dirty Job was thick with “I’ve got to read that line again” humor and there were a few moments of touching sorrow, it didn’t plumb the same philosophical quandaries as Lamb.

More importantly, A Dirty Job’s ending left me unsatisfied. Another book “ruined” (it’s hardly ruined so much as sullied) by a token romance tossed in as what seemed to be an afterthought. The romance, accompanied by its 14-inch high skull-faced squirrel minions, read like a hurried and chaotic response to some editor saying, “Chris, the book’s good, but it’s a downer for widowed Charlie to not have a love interest. Funny books should be uplifting.” The romance is neither funny nor uplifting, and it casts Beta Male Charlie in a decidedly shallow light. Really, Charlie? The hot redhead? You’ve got to be kidding me.

The one-dimensional redhead aside, you can’t beat Moore for “I wish I’d written that” characters and zingers. A Dirty Job is no exception. And perhaps readers less cynical than I—perhaps the ever-hopeful Beta Male readers— would consider the romance Charlie’s long overdue just reward.