Category: reviews (Page 6 of 10)

The Books of November

December 14, 2016 / lara

These are the books that I read in November. I intended to read a lot in November by not reading Facebook at bedtime. But it’s winter so mostly I went to sleep.

Books that I read

Mr. Fox — Helen Oyeyemi (2011)

Confusing. I love Oyeyemi’s short stories. And I actually enjoyed reading this book. I just don’t really know what happened in it. There are three characters. In some parts of the book the writer (St. John Fox) and his wife (Daphne Fox) are real and the writer’s muse (Mary Foxe) is figment of the writer’s imagination. In other parts of the book the muse is a real woman but the realness of the writer and his wife are in question. Or at least I think that’s what was going on.
I had to go and looked up a bunch of other reviews to try to figure out what I was missing then I read this. There are, it seems, fairy tales (Bluebeard’s Wife in the main) and meta-fictions, and commentaries on state of modern (male oriented) literature and it’s relationship to the female. And a bunch of other stuff that I managed to miss.
I was never sure who the characters were, where they were standing, and which worlds were real and which imaginary. Am I reading at the wrong time day to absorb all this? Am I simply an inattentive reader? How can I claim to have loved reading a book that baffled me so thoroughly.
* maybe I’m just weirdly attuned to quality even when I’m not able to track the story *

Woman Hollering Creek — Sandra Cisneros (2013)

A short story collection that touches on many of the same themes that Cisneros has been exploring since her first book. Identity is everything. For women in particular, the task of finding identity in a world that denies us an identity at the same time that it forces it’s idea of our identity on us can be fraught with confusions and missteps.
In this collection there are very short stories (almost vignettes) that drop us into a single perfected moment, as well as much longer pieces that develop multiple themes. All stories are linked by location, that area of the southwest/Texas that straddles the US-Mexico border.
If you have no Spanish you might need to run a few things through the Google translator.
* being female is a universal dilemma *

The Whole Town’s Talking — Fanny Flagg (2016)

The Whole Town’s Talking traces the birth, life, and death of a Minnesota town and it’s inhabitants. Life, death, and the after life — lucky and unlucky in love — the machinations and comedy of small town life, all of Flagg’s elements, are here.
The slightly kooky but very wise woman who lives alone. The town mayor and his busybody wife. The young lovers who age as we watch them. The town drunks (female and male). They all play out their parts on the town’s stage as the town itself moves from a farming settlement in the 1880’s to a prosperous middle-American town in the middle of the twentieth century though it’s passing away in the early twenty first century as the interstate and the mall and the big box stores kill off it’s old fashioned downtown.
The story is split between the characters living in the town of Elmwood, Minn and those same characters as they pass from life into the afterlife in the town’s cemetery — Still Meadows. It turns out that being dead isn’t quite as awful as we might have thought. The dead wake up in the cemetery and discover that there’s company and conversation. It is a bit dull, gossip and parlor games are about the only amusements, but the arrival of a new (dead) person in Still Meadows is the occasion for much excitement as the residents catch up with the news from the outside world.
I got an odd distanced feeling from this book. We, the readers, are in the same position as the dead at Still Meadows, not much happens to us. We just watch the going’s on in a world that we don’t participate in. Not my favorite Flagg.

* softly lit and comfortably homey, if not full of surprises*

The Books of October

November 7, 2016 / lara

There are not many books of October. It’s having been eaten alive (as was my brain) by the events surrounding Jim’s knee replacement.

Books that I read:

A House of My Own — Sandra Cisneros (2015)

I read this in bits while waiting around in the hospital and in the first few days after we got home. It was a good choice. Most of these pieces are the prefaces (to her own and other books), lectures, and other small publications that she has amassed over the years. Many of them touch on the questions of what is home and how do we build one and what does mean to have or not to have a home. Home is considered as a physical space, as well as a set of emotional connections, and the intellectual foundation of our work.
In one piece she is remembering and mourning the lovely home of a friend in Sarajevo. It’s a diatribe against war in the form of a touching memory of and nostalgia for a friendship and the place that evokes that friendship. Others are meditations on various authors and artists that have been important to her work and its development. And some are straight biography.
* With a couple of misses this collection is worth taking some time to dip into. *

The House on Mango Street — Sandra Cisneros (1991)

Cisneros’ first and most famous book. I read it when it was published but I haven’t seen it in years. It was mentioned to me by a fellow poet as being an example of multiple prose poetry/narrative/short-short story bits wrapped up to make a novel. A plan that could profitably be used by some of my own work. So this began as a study, but I had forgotten how heart-felt the book is. It is a book of adolescence, a time that features so many choices and twists and turns of personality. Cisneros manages to locate in each character and vignette the elements that are common to all of us.
* transgressive at publication, still insightful *

The Nix — Nathan Hill (2016)

A monster of a book — running more than 600 pages in print. There are so many plot threads that it’s as if the author thought he’d never get another chance to tell a story and so he told all the stories in one book. It starts with the protagonist mother abandoning the family. The lesson that Faye leaves Samuel with as she departs his life at the age of 11 is that the things that you love the most will hurt you the most.
Sadly, I found the adult Samuel who narrates the book, (a stalled writer and failed college professor with a computer gaming problem) dull as hell. Even the reappearance of his mother doesn’t make Samuel interesting. The story that he tells of his adolescence and first love, a perfect picture of how broken people infect other people, is affecting. And the story of his mother’s early life, the secret that she keeps and then leaves Samuel and his father for is likewise engaging.
But I can’t bring myself to say that I love the whole thing. I would have loved many parts of it as a much shorter stories or a series of novellas or something that didn’t sprawl all over the place with a protagonist that I just couldn’t quite sympathize with.
Several reviewers have called the book satirical. Well, maybe there are a couple of bits are meant to be satire. The plagiarizing student whose scheming plagues Samuel and eventually leads to his firing might be satirical but it’s not clever enough for me to give a damn.
In the end I can only say — if you have patience you should read The Nix for Faye’s story and the relationship between Samuel and his childhood friend Bishop (twin brother to Samuel’s first love Bethany who remains his ideal and gets a messy part later in the novel) If you’re not feeling patient wait perhaps for Mr. Hill’s second novel which likely won’t be quite so packed with every damned thing that he could think of.
* all this and the kitchen sink *

The Books of September

October 3, 2016 / lara

September — the end of summer — and still busy like summer. A handful of books read but nothing in the audio book list. I bought a lot of music this month.

The books I read:

Dogsbody — Diana Wynne Jones (1975/2012)

A pleasant young readers book. Not nearly as simplistic as some of the stuff being churned out today. You’ll have to do some thinking to follow along. It also helps if you know a little about dogs. The dogs here are very doggie, even if the dog at the center of the story is actually a star that’s been sentenced to live a dog’s life on earth until he manages a seemingly impossible task. The child at the center, Kathleen, is a young Irish girl billeted unhappily with her uncle’s family somewhere in middle(class) England. No one is happy about the situation. Kathleen’s rescue of a near drowned puppy only makes the situation worse.
This is one book that manages to violate my number rule one about dogs in books (thou shalt not kill the dog) without making me want to throw it across the room. Yes, I just spoiled it for you. Except that the dog doesn’t really “die”, he… well it’s complicated. Though I have to admit that Kathleen’s reaction at the end of the story is a little hard to comprehend. I think it’s just a slight weakness in the writing that makes Kathleen’s reaction seem so blank.
Really though, if you need a little something to kill off an afternoon of couch slouching while slightly ill you couldn’t do better than Dogsbody. (Or almost any Diane Wynn Jones book.)
* All dogs are stars fallen to Earth *

The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All — C. D. Wright (2016)

Wherein one of the most influential poets of the 20th century and beyond lays out her theory of poetry in a series of prose poems and fragments that examine not only her own work and that of her collaborations but also the work of a handful of poets who influenced her. For a woman who died so suddenly it seems prescient that she would have written a last book that so much serves to indicate the way for future readers and scholars to consider her work. If you are concerned with the poets mentioned or the act of making poetry it’s a worthwhile read. The Questionnaire of January that ends the work will provide you with a lifetime’s worth of inquiries onto the ways and means of making poetry. It also the longest title of any book that I have read. (That does not include titles that use a colon to make two separate titles appear as one. Which I consider cheating in the truest sense.)
* Wright’s Ars Poetica *

The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish — Linda Przybyszewski (2014)

What can I say… it’s a history, mostly, of the Home Economics movement and the powerful influence it had in early 20th century America seen through the lenses of a handful of women who taught, wrote, and lectured about the art dressing well on a reasonable budget. Here is where I have to admit that I am an absolute sucker for old Home Ec pamphlets and such. (Did you know that there is an entire digitized library of them?) This book is about the women who created them. And I would have loved it for a historical survey. If the author had left it at that. But it feels as if half the book is taken up with her histrionics of the “modern women are shameless and ill-dressed” type. Yeah, I know — I have some pretty dire opinions on the matter myself, but I’m not writing a history of the women who wrote about and influenced the lives of millions of middle and lower class women in the first half of the 20th century.
I’m glad I read the book, it’s right up in there in one of my favorite guilty pleasures but I’d have liked it a good deal more if it had stuck to its stated topic. If you’re a fan of all things dress and dressmaking you’ll enjoy it. If you looking for history you’ll find the author’s constant insertion of herself and her opinions unbearably unprofessional.
* Yeah, I’m old enough to have made that apron in Home Ec *

13 Clocks — James Thurber (Marc Simont — Illustrator) (original 1950)

I like Thurber. There I said it. I like the man with the funny dog cartoons and a lot more. This little gem of a fairy tale is either a fairy tale or a satire of a fairy tale or some lovely combination of the two, containing as it does an enchanted princess, a brave prince, and evil duke, and something that might be a fairy tale troll, or the weirdest fairy god mother ever. Whatever it is we are assured that it is the only one of its kind. Full of lovely mumblety-pumbelty language that begs to be read out loud.
* Fairy Tales never go out of style *

Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither — Sarah Baum (2015)

Two books with dogs in them in one month. That’s just not something that should happen. Two books with dogs in them that I actually liked (well maybe not “liked” but appreciated) in one month is a miracle of some sort. I can’t say I liked this book. Liked would imply that it was a pleasant light-hearted read. This isn’t. It is anything but happy and light-hearted; it’s a dense, beautiful, lyric, tragic thing. In all the meanings of tragic. The protagonist has a tragic flaw that will guide and perhaps ruin his life. So does the dog. It’s odd to think of a dog as a tragic hero. But this one is. Perhaps through no fault of his own.
The writing is lyrical. In the mode of poetry. In fact she uses a number of poetic devices. There are many melodically composed sentences, varying line length, alliteration. I even found pleasing examples of slant rhyme. There is also a great appreciation of the natural world filtered through malaise — is that the word that I want? The protagonist is some how very damaged and that damage colors his interactions with the world in a fearful and awed way. His relationship with the natural world is something that he’s build himself. No one taught him about the birds and the plants that he so admires and that seem to bring him into touch with the only flow of time that he encounters. All the rest of his life is a long, dull, fear-tinged now.

* A challenging book to read but rewarding in so may ways *

are you going through? — A Bend in the Road - Hoosier National Forest Indiana.

It’s Still a Big Damn Country

August 18, 2016 / lara

Recently I was looking for this picture of an artfully rusted steam engine that I took during a cross-country trip in 2009.

Portion of the Engines for the Wake Robin.

Rather than dig through the many thousands of photographs on the back-up server, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Country that I wrote while on that road trip. When I began that trip I was running very hard, and very fast, and very much away. I was running from myself and my itching demons. I was running on professional advice. I was making no progress while standing in the middle of the smoking crater that I had made of my life. My therapist — against all the rules of therapy — actually suggested that I go ahead and run for a while, to see what it felt like to move again. So I did. I packed up my little blue car with a handful of road snacks, my special pillow, and every scrap of camera gear that I owned, then set out on the finest fool’s errand I could conjure: To attend the graduation party of my oldest niece two weeks hence in the city of Pittsburgh and along the way to take as many pictures of as many dams as I could find. Continue reading

The Books of July

August 9, 2016 / lara

July was a thin month for books. I had a week in Port Townsend for the Centrum writer’s conference and some personal issues to attend to. But I did get through a few things.

Books I Read:

The Hatred of Poetry — Ben Lerner (2016)

The most often quoted bit in the reviews of this book begins: ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is.’
Lerner goes on to read the problem of poetry in neo-platonic terms. That poetry is always bound to fail because we are forever comparing a written piece of poetry to some Ideal that we hold. He goes on to partially dismantle this Ideal by considering the problems of how we have set up the Ideal in a world in which the Ideal is never has never existed.
It takes about 2 hours to read this — and at $8.50 its over-priced for something that runs less than a 100 pages. (List price is $12.) I’m not sorry that I bought it and certainly not sorry that I read it. But I’m also not sure that I got my money’s worth. Must be the philosophy degree that snuck up behind me and said “That’s just the Platonic Ideal and as an epistemology it’s pretty simplistic, surely poetry is more complex that that.”
* Surprising return to my original course of study *

Bukowski in a Sundress — Kim Addonizio (2016)

I was hoping to really like this book of essays. There are a couple — particularly those that involve the end of her mother’s life — that strike me as deeply felt and filled with the great ambivalence that so many of us feel toward our mothers as we close in on the age that they were when we first knew them adult-to-adult and they continue to advance into the future ahead of us. Many of the other essays are simply about behaving badly into your middle age and don’t speak to me. I gave up eating, drinking, and fucking like one of the boys a long time ago.
Anyway. It hasn’t changed may opinion of her poetry, which I’ve always liked. Go read that if you want to see how well Kim can write.
* Maybe not worth the price of admission for most of my readers. *

The Fran Leibowitz Reader — Fran Leibowitz (1994)

Fran holds up fairly well even though most of these pieces were written decades ago. Her curmudgeonly disregard for the niceties of society are universal and eternal. Children are still too often seen and heard in places that ought to be the province of adults. Smoking is still one of the joys of adulthood — though I gave it up 10 years ago. A few of these essays are hopelessly dated, but some stand up to the passage of time even when the topic under discussion is no longer in existence. For example: How to be a Directory Service. We may not have Directory Assistance any more but we have Customer Support call centers and the lessons for the truly gifted support staff are the same.
* classics of snark *

Nightmare Stacks — Charles Stross (2016)

Each story in the Laundry Files series has upped the ante and the level of horror and the level of threat. Until at this point it’s nearly impossible to top the previous act. Given Mr Stross’s penchant for burning down the building at the end of each book, just before the hero manages to save earth but barely, there are not a lot of buildings left. Alex (the genius mathematician/vampire) and Peter (the apocalyptically savvy vicar) are sent to Leeds. Because where else would the apocalypse happen? The story goes on to become mostly a satire with a twist of the goth girl/vampire urban romance. Except that there are, of course, ancient and vicious beings intent of destroying the earth and enslaving it’s population. I gave up — it’s just too much of muchness with the previous incarnations. Once upon a time… knowing that a book would delivery the same sort of story and the same sort of characters doing the same sorts of things with the same level of humor appealed to me. (Terry Pratchett, Piers Anthony, Spider Robinson, et al) but lately I’ve begun to find it less enchanting.
* still a good yarn, but the same color as the last one *

Books I Listened to:

Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (1813/2015)

When I read this in high school I just didn’t understand it. But now, oh my god, the caricatures are priceless pieces of work. This version is narrated by Rosamund Pike and her voices are deadpan and revealing, each one appropriate to the character. Even her Mr. Darcy is near to perfection; coming off as both proud and shy. The shy part being the one that most interpreters of the role don’t convey.
* Maybe I now get the appeal of Austen? *

I also continued to listen to Sherlock Holmes. It goes on forever…