Prose

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir — Sherman Alexie (2017)

A com­pli­cated book on a com­pli­cated sub­ject. Many slight chap­ters made up of short essays, sto­ries, and poems.
This is a reflec­tion on life with a com­plex woman and the haz­ards of moth­er­ing and being moth­ered. Alexie’s mother Lillian … she what? Had demons? Don’t we all. Her demons inter­fered with her abil­ity to mother. And Alexi’s demons, so very close to those of his mother made it hard for him to be moth­ered. It’s a two-​way prob­lem between moth­ers and chil­dren: shar­ing the alco­hol a bipo­lar demons. And then there’s crush­ing poverty — the finan­cial and spir­i­tual and cul­tural of reser­va­tion life. In some ways it’s a tough book to fig­ure out. There is the par­tic­u­lar to the Alexie’s expe­ri­ence (and his mother’s.) More broadly, it is also about the haz­ards to fam­i­lies of liv­ing as a reser­va­tion Indian. And even more gen­er­ally to the expe­ri­ence of being Indian. But at both its heart and its outer lim­its it is about the prob­lem of being a dys­func­tional child of a dys­func­tional par­ent. We live and learn, some times late in life, and then we mourn the things that were and the things will never have been.
* grief can be a clear lens *

Vinegar Girl — Ann Tyler (2016)

I used to like Tyler’s work but some­how the voice in this is too? Common and pedes­trian. This retelling of Taming of the Shrew didn’t win me over because I didn’t like Kate. Really didn’t like Tyler’s Kate. She is a bum­bling, aim­less, preschool assis­tant with­out a per­son­al­ity. She’s so bland that I can­not begin to care about her. On top of that the voice and the story (which I nor­mally love) didn’t pull me in at all.
* some­times the orig­i­nal is best left alone *

 

 

The Art of Racing in the Rain — Garth Stein (2008)

Ayrton Senna name check aside I had a bad feel­ing about this book when I read the Kindle pre­view. But the dog as nar­ra­tor thing might be inter­est­ing and there is rac­ing… so I started it. At 15% of the way through there’s already a nice lady with brain tumor thing going on. Leading inevitably to a trag­i­cally moth­er­less lit­tle girl and all of that. Not to men­tion it turns out that the dog is an aging beast with a mar­tyr com­plex. So I stopped to check the reviews, so much praise, until I hit on a cou­ple of poor reviews with spoil­ers. (Yeah I some­times read the spoil­ers.) Rape alle­ga­tions? Child taken by CPS? ON top of the already quite melo­dra­matic sit­u­a­tion. Really? This is look­ing more than iffy. I just can’t.
* I don’t read to be manip­u­lated by ama­teurs *

 

Adventures of John Blake — Philip Pullman and Fred Fordham (2017)

Graphic novel about a boy trapped on a haunted ship that is shut­tled back and forth through time seek­ing the knowl­edge and a cer­tain item that will allow them to con­trol their path. The crew is made up of sailors col­lected along the way. From an ancient roman to the John Blake, a mid-​20^th cen­tury son of a sci­en­tist who may have invented the device that allows time travel and that set the haunted Mary Alice on its course. It’s an enter­tain­ing, quick read. Don’t expect Pullman’s mar­velous prose to show up. It’s a graphic novel and the con­ven­tions are dif­fer­ent. The illus­tra­tions are nice but not ter­ri­bly imag­i­na­tive. Which, I think, is a good thing. I’m tired of Extraordinary Illustrations that make fol­low­ing the story dif­fi­cult.
The plot goes along. There’s a mod­ern tech­nol­ogy vil­lain and the end result is a nice vic­tory for John and his mod­ern com­pan­ion Serena.
I can see this as the script for an action-​adventure with teenagers. I might actu­ally go to see it.
I’m look­ing for­ward to Pullman return­ing to prose with his next book sup­pos­edly set back in the world of Oxford and Lyra.
* cross­ing gen­res to good effect *

Outlander — Diana Gabaldon (2005)

Historical Romance with Time Travel. Yes I cap­i­tal­ized all of those words. Set in 18^th Century Scotland and other parts of Europe as the saga goes on. It does help a lit­tle to know what’s going on but you can get along even if your grasp of English his­tory is weak. (You can read all about the pol­i­tics of the time in wikipedia is you want to.)
So (Girl) Claire falls through a hole in time (in a henge) and ends up stum­bling into an English Patrol where bad things are threat­ened. She is then res­cued by a Scottish raid­ing party. Bad things, but not quite so bad, are threat­ened. She doc­tors one of the mem­bers of the party and we meet (Boy) Jamie Frazer going under the name McKenzie. An out­lawed man. The story goes on in sweetly pre­dictable ways — Claire is threat­ened. Jamie res­cues her. They are forced to marry, but later fall in love. Jamie goes off to try to find some­one to help him get out from under his death sen­tence. Claire is threat­ened Jamie res­cues her (a few more times) until in the last huge set piece of the book Claire must res­cue Jamie from an English prison. Then all decamp for France. This should be a spoiler but you can tell from the begin­ning that the two pro­tag­o­nists are going to sur­vive and that the pat­tern of dan­ger, res­cue, dan­ger, res­cue, sex, dan­ger, sex, res­cue, sex is going to go on for a long time.
The sex scenes are fre­quent, pretty well writ­ten, and occa­sion­ally very dis­turb­ing. If you have a prob­lem with rape cul­ture (and 18^th cen­tury Scotland/​England is a pretty damned rapey place) — then you might want to skip this.
There are another dozen or so books in the world. Eight directly in the series and a hand­ful that revolve around other points.
So… will I run out and read them all now? No, the books aren’t that good and are a bit pre­dictable. I’d get bored if I read another one right away. But later? The next time I need some­thing to shore up a long week­end at the beach or a deadly dull air­line flight? Yeah, I prob­a­bly will reach out for the next book in the series.
* at least at the end it’s the hero­ine doing the res­cu­ing *

The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel

- Hiromi Kawakami, A.M. Powell, trans (2017)
Weird lit­tle novel about a thrift shop in Japan and the owner, his sis­ter, and the two peo­ple who work there. A small, inmate book. I kept want­ing some­thing amaz­ing to hap­pen but it didn’t. In a way it was an all day toy train wreck. I can’t not love it though. The way in which the pro­tag­o­nist (Hitomi) stum­bles through her aim­less twen­ties. Not quite reach­ing the unreach­able boy she works with. And the par­al­lels between her unsuc­cess­ful run to love and her boss’s dal­liance with the high-​powered antique dealer and his sister’s dal­liance with the soon to be deceased. Really they are all in love with some­one they ought not to be and it just doesn’t quite work out for any­one.
* var­i­ous states of mis-​shapen love *

The Moth: 50 True Stories — Catherine Burns, ed. (2013)

50 short mono­logues from var­i­ous Moth events and broad­casts. Just what Moth is well explained the three intro­duc­tions. (Yes, three.) True sto­ries of one sort and other. I’d esti­mate that most of them ran 5 — 10 min­utes live/​on air. Some really effec­tive story telling. If you’re a fan of essays you’ll rec­og­nize a cou­ple of the sto­ry­tellers but most are aver­age peo­ple recount­ing some not so aver­age event in their lives.
* good short mono­logues — refresh­ing story telling *

Poetry:

No Planets Strike — Josh Bell (2004)

 

 

 

 

and

Alamo Theory — Josh Bell (2016)

A cou­ple of mind expand­ing col­lec­tions. The first, No Planets Strike<?em>, is raw and unnerv­ing, what with Ramona, and the gen­tle handed holy father, and zom­bies. The sec­ond, Alamo Theory, is more accom­plished and pol­ished but… it lacks the mar­velous ner­vous­ness that the first one had. Both con­tain work that is some­times ran­dom in a care­fully plot­ted way designed to throw the reader off the scent. Both of these col­lec­tions are very sonic; It’s good to read them out loud but I would say essen­tial for Alamo Theory. Also note that Alamo Theory was pub­lished by Copper Canyon and is a square book — a for­mat that allows Bell’s ling line lengths enough room to breathe on the page and a decent type size. No Planets Strike suf­fers from a lot of crowd­ing and very small font. 

* I like bad boy poets, though they are a bit less thrilling as they grow up *

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 *