magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Books of June

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This month in nonfiction:

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior — Catherine Johnson and Temple Grandin (2006)

Ms. Grandin has a unique per­spec­tive on ani­mal behav­ior that is informed by her own autism. She is very opin­ion­ated but you have to trust the opin­ion of a woman who has spent so many years care­fully watch­ing ani­mals. It is inter­est­ing to see some of the folk­lore  of ani­mal train­ers and man­agers (such as the loca­tion of hair whorls on the faces of horses and cat­tle cor­re­lat­ing with flight­i­ness) backed up by expe­ri­ence and exper­i­ment. The ref­er­ences are some­what dated but the book is full of insights that are now being proven in sci­en­tific exper­i­ments. I will be very inter­ested to see how she expand on these ideas in her later book “Animals Make Us Human.”
* shift your per­spec­tive for a while *

 

 

Train the Dog in Front of You — Denise Fenzi (2016)

The best piece of dog train­ing advice I’ve got­ten this year. Maybe ever. Train the dog you have. In order to do that you have to pay atten­tion to your dog’s par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity and learn­ing styles. Fenzi offers a hand­ful of modes/​aspects/​facets that you can use to begin to orga­nize your thoughts as you observe your dog. Well worth the rather steep price.
* there is no point in wait­ing for the per­fect dog *

This month in essays:

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life — Samantha Irby (2017)

Ah, this one caused me a good deal of grief as I tried to for­mu­late an opin­ion. Angry POC women are a com­mon essay bucket at the book store these days. It’s about time that they got a chance for their voices to be heard and yet. And yet. POC, queer, and dis­abled is no guar­an­tee of inter­est­ing.

A lot of peo­ple loved this book. I just didn’t find it that funny; funny requires orig­i­nal and a glimpse of human­ity that is truly dar­ing. There is a guard­ed­ness about her rev­e­la­tions — a sense that she is dar­ing me to not find the sit­u­a­tions funny that –under­cuts these essays. Her overeat­ing, poverty dri­ven money fetishiz­ing, trash tele­vi­sion lov­ing life doesn’t speaks to me of larger human con­cerns in a new way.
* TMI isn’t the same as imi­tate — it just isn’t *

This month in fiction:

The Shipping News — Annie Proulx (1993)

Yeah, late to the party. I’d never read it. The Shipping News is much more darkly comic than I was led to believe. I enjoyed it, even the weird writ­ing style. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of all those frag­ments with the long lists of things. I was also impressed by how much she knew or learned about Newfoundland, fish­ing, and boats — espe­cially build­ing boats. The excerpts from the knot book at the begin­ning of the chap­ters were inter­est­ing on their own and added nicely the story. All in all I found this rather to my taste even though I hated Brokeback Mountain. So, do I dare to read another of her books?
* Weird, eerie, and darkly comic *

 

 

Camino Island — John Grisham (2017)

Great engag­ing plot. A caper involv­ing the theft of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s man­u­scripts and a blocker writer recruited very much against her will to entrap the man who may have bought the man­u­scripts from the thieves. Grisham’s prose is dry and thin. Lakes are pretty. Girls are tall. Buildings are old. Some peo­ple claim that it’s taut; I think it’s just unimag­i­na­tive. The char­ac­ters aren’t all that well-​rounded either. The woman from the insur­ance group who recruits the pro­tag­o­nist is such a stick fig­ure that I can have torn her out of a fash­ion mag­a­zine. Widely reviled by the Grisham faith­ful. But as a non-​Grisham read­ing fan of both the capers and that genre of mys­tery known as the cozy it worked well enough for me.
* a beach book for the fan of both capers and cozies *

 

Gwendy’s Button Box — Steven King and Richard Chizmar (2017)

This novella about of a girl given a gift by a mys­te­ri­ous man in a bowler hat cir­cles the rim of out­right hor­ror but never quite dips into the whirlpool. The man in the bowler hat gives Gwendy a box that will deliver two gifts (choco­lates and sil­ver dol­lars) when­ever she asks. But there other but­tons on the top whose use is left unex­plained. As time goes on Gwendy begins to develop a the­ory about their pur­pose. Only once does she use one of the but­tons on the box and at the same time an enemy is van­quished in a prop­erly hor­ri­fy­ing man­ner. Did Gwendy cause this or was it coin­ci­dence? She never quite sure but becomes con­vinced that the box is dan­ger­ous and its actions fraught with unin­tended con­se­quences. How should Gwendy deal with the box and it’s pow­ers? Can she stay on the right side of good and evil?
* what if some­one gave you Pandora’s box with­out an instruc­tion man­ual? *

 

The Book of Polly — Kathy Hepinstall (2017)

Another child nar­ra­tor — as the book begins the 10 year-​old Willow is pre­oc­cu­pied with the idea that her mother Polly will die. As well as telling out­ra­geous lies about her mother, she is obsessed with a secret that her mother is keep­ing. The rela­tion­ship between moth­ers and daugh­ters is explored in the con­text of an older mother, well estab­lished in her sar­cas­tic know every­thing per­son­al­ity, and her equally uncon­ven­tional late-​in-​life child. As Willow turns 16, Polly is indeed dying. With the help of her miss­ing brother’s odd ball friend , Willow sets out to get a mir­a­cle for her mother and in the process to dis­cover her secrets. I am par­tic­u­larly impres­sive is Hepinstall’s cre­ation of a unique voice for the teenage Willow.
* south­ern gothic with a heap­ing side of humor *

The Books of May

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This month in prose:

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories — Mehvesh Murad & Jared Shurin(eds) (2017)

A col­lec­tion of  new and tra­di­tional tales of the Djinn. Several of these are excel­lent. One is a com­monly reprinted bit of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where the Djinn is a taxi dri­ver. Other sto­ries range from the tra­di­tional, to poetry, to ones set in mod­ern Islam. There are also a cou­ple of pretty ter­rific future world/​Sci-​Fi sto­ries. The range of sto­ries and ver­sions of the djinn in Islamic folk­lore is amaz­ing. Happily this book is far from a bunch of white folks riff­ing on some­one else’s cul­ture. Also it has one of the high­est rations of good sto­ries to meh sto­ries in any mul­ti­ple author col­lec­tion that I have read in the last three years.
* eclec­tic can be a fab­u­lous thing. *

 

The Thirteenth Tale — Diane Setterfield (2006)

Another twins story. The writer Vida Winter has told a thou­sand and two sto­ries about her ori­gins, all untrue and most fan­tas­tic. But now at the end of her life she decides that she will tell one biog­ra­pher the truth. Her cho­sen biog­ra­pher is Margaret Lea, a ret­i­cent book­worm who lives above her father’s anti­quar­ian book shop. At the end of their ini­tial inter­view Ms. Lea announces her only con­di­tion for the work: that Ms. Winter only the truth. The truth in this case is at least as fan­tas­tic as any of the sto­ries that the author has told to pre­vi­ous inter­view­ers.
There are secrets on top of secrets and mis­di­rec­tions and … in spite of it all you feel for both the talker and the lis­tener while this eerie and tragic tale unfolds. With a wholly sat­is­fac­tory, though not quite inevitable, twist at the end. Well writ­ten enough to make the story para­mount.
* good, though I think I might be done with tragic twins for a while *

Rabbit Cake — Annie Hartnett (2017)

“A new novel about the griev­ing process” is absolutely not a tag line that would make me pick up a book. But once in a while Amazon gets the “If you liked A you might like B” thing right and throws a book that you would oth­er­wise not con­sider into your pile.  So I read the sam­ple. And then I read the book. Because… what if you were an almost 12-​year-​old, and what is your name was Elvis, (and what of it if you’re a girl with a boy’s name,) and what if you have a weirdly fact filled head, and what if your mother drown while sleep­walk­ing (actu­ally sleep-​swiming), and what if you know that you should be griev­ing but you aren’t sure you’ve doing it right? That’s a lot of “what-​ifs” to find in the first 10% — the Amazon sam­ple length — of a book. Enough what-​ifs to make me want to spend time in the head of this won­der­fully odd-​ball 12-​year-​old.
* what-​if you ignored the blurbs and just read the book *

Sharks in the Rivers — Ada Limon (2010)

Yes, there are sharks here. Free swim­ming, clearly, and decid­edly out-​of-​place. Things in places where they don’t quite belong are the sub­jects of these poems. And often the thing that doesn’t quite belong is the writer her­self.
* things that are out-​of-​place are more inter­est­ing that things that are where they belong *

 

This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse — Ada Limon (2006)

Stories in verse are some­thing that I would usu­ally run away from.  They tend to be too much about the story and not enough about the poems them­selves. These are dif­fer­ent. Each poem stands on it’s own and advances the nar­ra­tive at the same time. Prodigious work. Our pro­tag­o­nist — the man in the grey suit, the unrec­i­p­ro­cat­ing object of his affec­tions — the hard­ware store lady, his rather inco­her­ent friend Lewis and the object of Lewis’s epis­to­lary obses­sion, Ronald Reagan wan­der through the their days and inter­act — each with each other and their own desires and obses­sions.
* let­ters to RR maybe the odd­est thing I’ve seen in a poem recently *

The Books of April

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Cutting for Stone — Abraham Verghese (2009)

The book is very long. I started it in March and it took me most of April to fin­ish it.
The twins (Marion and Shiva Stone) at the cen­ter of Cutting for Stone come into the world in a messy and pecu­liar way. Their mother, a shy Indian nun, dies giv­ing birth to them and their father, and American doc­tor, runs off in a panic. So the boys are left to be raised by the doc­tors and matron of the Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. The two boys act and think as if they were a sin­gle entity for much of their child­hoods. It is as if they were born (con­joined at the head) and then agreed to split up the world and their reac­tions to the world. Marion tak­ing on the out­go­ing, pleas­ant, social per­son­al­ity and Shiva tak­ing on all of the dark, moody, and anti-​social bits.
I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed with how it ends, I mean it had to go some­where — I get that. and… it seemed inevitable that the twins were not going to have a happy res­o­lu­tion. That some­how there hav­ing been two of them, sep­a­rated but still act­ing as one — that in the end there couldn’t be two of them in the world. And is that their indi­vid­ual faults or the fault of being born twins? I liked the book, but I’m not sure that I am encour­aged to read oth­ers by the same author. It’s a kind of funny thing when it comes to read­ing such “other” expe­ri­ences — I rarely want to expe­ri­ence them a sec­ond or third time from the same point of view. I, mag­pie like, want to go on to col­lect another point of view. That is in cases where the writ­ing doesn’t make me swoon. And here the writ­ing does not make me swoon. It is com­pe­tent and in places quite pleas­ant but its noth­ing spe­cial.

Rules of Civility — Amor Towles (2011)

Not as nifty as The Gentleman of Moscow. But the his­toric back­ground doesn’t play nearly as big a part. Here we have a young woman in NYC on New Year’s Eve 1937 sit­ting with her pal in a second-​rate club wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen. That some­thing is Tinker Grey. Katey Kontent (hate the last name it tripped me up every sin­gle time I read it) is an okay nar­ra­tor. She’s a bit bland around the edges but I think that’s part of the point, she’s Every Girl mak­ing her way in the big city. The peo­ple who sur­round her for the year of the story are the inter­est­ing points and in fact the writer via Katey as much as admits that it’s the case that some­times we find our­selves sur­rounded by peo­ple and events that will catch us up in their swirl with­out actu­ally hav­ing much effect on our­selves. They whirl around us and then leave us to go on in another direc­tion with other peo­ple. (It’s some­thing that I’ve thought about a bunch myself — how we seem to be so inti­mately con­nected with peo­ple as we are in a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion but so eas­ily lose them when the cir­cum­stances change and we are no longer thrown together by some­thing larger than our­selves.) The whole thing is a bit like Fitzgerald — who I don’t actu­ally like. I find him dry and his char­ac­ters off-​puttingly shal­low. This book comes close to being that shal­low.
The title is taken from the young George Washington’s list of Rules for him­self. And the rules are included at the end of the book. Young GW was a prissy lit­tle shit.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk — Kathleen Rooney (2017)

Lillian Boxfish is 85, it’s New Year’s Eve and she’s decided to take a walk across Manhattan. First to Delmonico’s and then to a party hosted by a young pho­tog­ra­pher that she met in the park. It’s a long walk and we are treated to not only Lillian’s ver­sion of Manhattan in 1985 but along the way to her life story. And it’s a pretty cracker jack story. Running from her first days in Manhattan to her reign as the high­est paid adver­tis­ing woman in America (writ­ing copy for Macy’s in its glory days) through a mar­riage a birth, a break­down, a divorce, a free­lance career, and now as a woman of a cer­tain age liv­ing on her own in a city that she dearly loves but that has changed in unpleas­ant ways. Lillian and the book are both witty, wise, and a bit wicked.

 

Everybody’s Fool — Richard Russo (2016)

Sully is back and with a mild bit of good for­tune in his wake and a not so hot report from the car­di­ol­o­gist at the VA mar­ring his future he’s not sure how the world is sup­posed to work this week. And then there’s Police Chief Raymer whose grief at the loss of his wife is tem­pered by the sus­pi­cion that she was intend­ing to leave him the day she fell down the stairs and the stray garage door remote that he found in her car. The rest of the crowd is here too. There are some snakes (both the hiss­ing kind and the human kind) and whole lot of peo­ple try­ing to make sense of their lives and cir­cum­stances. Russo writes with humor and deep insight into the ways in which we all flit­ter and flus­ter our ways through life. (Read Nobody’s Fool first.)

Books of March

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Fiction:

The Bear and The Nightingale: A Novel — Katherine Arden (2017)

Best fairy tale I’ve read in a long time. I was skep­ti­cal at first. But the hero­ine is more than a pretty face with an inter­est­ing fate. I can’t be sure, as I am no expert, but the story seems to be more Russian than most set in that fairy tale world. The author was a Russian major in col­lege. Well writ­ten, you won’t find your­self con­stantly thrown out of the story by a bad turn of phrase as you are so often in fairy tales.

 

Nonfiction:

Minding the Muse — Priscilla Long (2016)

Better than the aver­age book on cre­ativ­ity — it allows for indi­vid­u­al­ity. And it’s a reminder about the need for daily (nearly) work that I need to hear.

 

 

300 Arguments — Sarah Manguso (2017)

Don’t bother. I like books of frag­ments (99 God and Bluets are exam­ples) but this one doesn’t hang together as any sort of nuanced state­ment on the world. It got a lot of praise but I just didn’t find the thread that was sup­posed to link the apho­risms to make them some­thing other than a jum­ble. There are a few that cut to the quick though. The best being:

“There will come a time when peo­ple decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.”

Poetry:

All of this month’s poetry books are con­cerned with the domes­tic — but what dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences of home the poets bring.

The Day Before: Poems — Dick Allen (2003)

I remem­ber lik­ing these poems while I was read­ing them but a month later I don’t remem­ber any­thing spe­cific about them. What’s up with that? I don’t know what to think of poems that I like but that don’t leave a solid mark on me. I had to go and look at them again to write this review. These poems are pedes­trian — in a good way — the way in which some­one with­out another des­ti­na­tion in mind wan­ders down the street in a mid­size town just look­ing and won­der­ing about every­thing they see. They are rooted in times and places and peo­ple and above all the lit­tle bits of nature that exist for us in every set­ting. But they didn’t stick. Hmmm.

 

 

Bright Dead Things: Poems — Ada Limón (2015)

When she writes about her expe­ri­ences of being dis­lo­cated from the city to rural Kentucky, Limon writes with humor and appre­ci­a­tion of both envi­ron­ments . Her descrip­tions of Kentucky horse coun­try from the point of view of a non-​rural, non-​horsey per­son are delight­fully vivid. She also brings her fresh per­spec­tive to her rela­tion­ships and the loss of her step-​mother. There is a won­der­ful imme­di­acy and hon­esty in these poems. Very down to earth, even when she’s being man­i­cally unre­al­is­tic.

 

 

 

The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected -Lynn Emanuel (2015)

Lynn Emmanuel is one of my favorite poets. I am always taken with her bit­ing, clear-​eyed look at the places and peo­ple who make up her life. This vol­ume includes a cou­ple of my favorite old poems and some new favorites as well.

The Books of February

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Slade House - David Mitchell (2015)

Fans of Mitchell's recent work will enjoy the little bumps against his Bone Clocks. I won't spoil it by telling you how it ends but you'll enjoy the frisson of recognition. Once every nine years a house appears in Slade Alley and one special person is allowed to enter. Except that entry might not be the best thing to happen to you. Mitchel writes a tight book in four parts. Each part standing alone as a nicely creepy short story and the whole making a part of the universe established in the The Bone Clocks. Worthwhile for fans of Mitchell and the milder forms of horror.

 

Swing Time - Zadie Smith (2016)

We start with an unnamed narrator (why that choice? and why didn't I notice), her self-educating mother and loving if unambitious father. The arc of the book follows the narrator's childhood friendship with Tracey, rooted in a love of dance and old musicals, through the end of the girls' friendship in high school. Though they go their separate ways there is a link between the two girls that continues to influence their lives. After college our unnamed narrator begins to work for a pop mega-star as a PA. She loses much of her own life - subsumed by the requirement that she dedicate all her time and energy to participating in the star's life. Eventually coming to discover that she has no life of her own. That revelation - that she has no life of her own and that she has thus not managed the difficult work of maturing from a twenty-something free spirit. (Was she ever really free?) into the sort of directed thirty-three year old that her education and intelligence suggest that she could have been. She loses her job at thirty-three and must begin again at the stage most of us reach three or four years out of college when our first jobs give way to a career.
This a book that has garnered mixed reviews. I didn't find the scene switching (location and time) to be difficult to follow. Smith's writing is quite clear enough to make her leaps perfectly obvious. And in general I liked the writing. I do wish that Smith had either come down harder on the question of western "meddling," especially by the famous but ignorant, in poorer regions of the world or that she has stuck to the theme of dance and had actually done something with the title musical. Swing Time.
I also thing that the book didn't need all that wrapping up. I was willing to let the story wind down to the denouement of the narrator being set adrift to find herself at a late age. Rather than seeing the mess unwinding.
Anyway - did I like the book? Yes. Did I like that characters - several of them no. Did I like the writing - yes. So go read it and don't be a weenie because the narrator (heroine) isn't a full person - she's not meant to be.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (2007)

I liked A Thousand Splendid Suns but it was a terrible struggle to deal with at moments. It is at its core the story of two women (Miriam and Laila) - a generation apart - who have to deal with life shitting on them. And the shit is awful. There are some truly awful human beings here. Not the tragically flawed ones like Jalil (Miriam's father) but the husband Rasheed is despicable. Anyway - it's a heart stopping book. You keep thinking that things must work out, or that they can't get worse and yet in a war-torn Kabul things can always get worse. Insights into the Afghan soul perhaps, but the things described are so universal that you never feel left out or alienated. And you'll cheer like mad when karma and Rasheed finally run into one another head on, even if it is at great cost to all the other characters in the book.

 

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper - Phaedra Patrick (2016)

Light weight, not too filling, not even well written but if you liked Backman's Ove and similar grumpy old men then you may like Arthur Pepper and his predicament. The premise - the finding of a mysterious charm bracelet that belonged to his late wife is promising and yet, the charms and their stories don't add up and the contrivances of how Arthur manages to find out about most of the charms are far too "convenient." None the less Arthur is kind of endearing and so you read on.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles (2016)

The story of what happens to an aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, who returns (you might think unwisely) to Russia after the revolution and finds himself not up against a wall offered a final cigarette but, because of piece of revolutionary poetry that he wrote, turned into a Former Person and sentenced to house arrest in the famous Metropol hotel. Spanning more than 30 years of the Count's life and featuring two young ladies who intersect with and utterly alter his life, this is an engaging book with interesting characters and a lot of personal action on a large historic background. Perfect beach book.

 

Daring Greatly - Brené Brown (2012)

Self help book by a researcher who is best known for her work on shame. I've read her before and things here stain that oddly mushy feeling. There's really nothing here that you haven't heard and seen a dozen times. Though I did find her explicitly calling out of the set of gender expectations that men carry around to be a refreshing change from the usual focus only on women's experience of gender roles. I'm just not sure I buy that value she places on vulnerable. Bravery I get and vulnerability in relationships I get but vulnerability to the whole world. No - I think not. That's how you get taken advantage of. Basically you can sum up the contribution of this book as "be brave even when you're scared.
Anyway - much of a muchness with her other books and others in the genre. I'm sorry I bothered with it.

Caraval - Stephanie Garber (2017)

The protagonist sees colors to go with her emotions. Which gives you a pretty good idea of how the writing is going to go. There is a fairy tale beginning - evil father, loving sisters and a diabolical regime of control and punishment. Sisters Scarlett and Donatella must somehow escape their terrible situation. (It wouldn't be a fairy tale otherwise) The girls run away (or are kidnapped it sort of depends on who you're talking to at the moment) to Caraval, a 5-night fantasy game with an impressive prize at the end. It's all a bit The Night Circus without the great and imaginative writing. The end works well and the twist isn't one that I saw coming but once revealed it all made perfect sense. Really if the habit of explaining every single one of Scarlett's emotional responses (complete with color) hadn't gotten in the so often way I might be recommending this book much more highly. Also the dresses - way too much time is spent describing a round of fantasy dresses that all sound exactly the same except for the colors.
 

Bad Feminist - Roxane Gray (2014)

The starring essay on nature of privilege carries a reminder that lack of/possession of privilege must not be used as means of silencing others voices. A reminder that we need given the hot and heavy rhetoric in the current climate of resistance.
The essays on reality TV and a handful of books that I haven't read aren't interesting. None of them makes me want to experience whatever (TV or book) she's talking about. If critique doesn't intrigue with its insights then what is the point?
Several of her essays reflect on the need to be careful and precise with language. Not in a prissy way. She'd be all for being precisely horrible if that was your intention. As long as you are matching language to intention it's all good. There is something to be said for an attitude that removes the "nice" and puts the emphasis on concision and intentionality. Be true, even if your truth is harsh or unpopular.
I also liked her on trigger warnings. She points out that they are in the end, pointless because the world isn't safe, but there are places where the illusion of safety is necessary and trigger warnings have their place in them. The argument is little more nuanced that just this but it basically comes down to you can keep your trigger warnings in your safe spaces to promote a sense of safety (illusory) but don't expect me to create safe spaces in my spaces. My spaces aren't safe. Never will be, so don't come here if you need an illusion of safety.
Isn't that just the rub - so much safety vs danger. and where is the danger? One wonders. Is it necessary to use someone else's definition of danger? Interesting question. Is it like that volume of Best American Essays that I didn't like where the editor's main criterion was risk. Risk as defined by whom was the first question I wanted to ask. Risk as the main criterion for judging the value of work seems shallow. I think that the same applies to dangerous ideas. If the only thing that your work has going for it is danger, then what have you actually got?
(No this paragraph length aside doesn't belong in a book review - but hey they're my reviews for my purposes so it stays.)
Anyway - there are a couple of good essays here and a whole lot of boring pop-culture gushing. Read it or don't. It's not that important of a book. (Sigh - I was hoping that it might be.)