It’s always night when I arrive.
The little Embraer 145 lands and shudders to a heavily braked stop at the end of the runway. Then turns and taxis back toward the terminal. Where an air-stair is wheeled up to the side of the plane and we, the passengers, descend.
The air is warm and damp, and smells of wood smoke, jet fuel, silt, and drains.
At the bottom of the stairs I pick up the carry on luggage that never fits in the overhead bins. Then pull my clicking, wheeled bags across the tarmac and onto the concrete sidewalk under a canopy beside a patch of coarse, unnaturally green grass.
The Arrival Hall is a fluorescent lit, eight-foot wide corridor full of gringos attempting to puzzle out the immigration form with its dense, cryptic, oh so foreign instructions.
I am anointed as “one who knows” not for my awful Spanish, but because of my ability to properly fill out this form — information repeated twice. Once in ample spaces at the top of the form. And then again at the bottom in tiny spaces barely big enough for your initials let alone your Appelidos and Nombres. Continue reading “Arrival”
The Books of August
Books I read:
The Anthologist — Nicholson Baker.
I loved it. You won’t like it. Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense does it? It’s a short novel about a poet who is trying, and failing, to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry. He procrastinates, cleans his office, moons over his ex-girlfriend, helps a neighbor install a new floor, cuts his fingers (repeatedly), and discusses at length the misconceptions foisted on the English-speaking poetry world about the worth of rhyme (lots according to our narrator) and iambic pentameter (very little,) along with a lot of other poetry geekiness. So if gossip about poets and discourse on the value of structure in poetry do it for you. You’ll enjoy this. Otherwise… you’ll be bored.
Girl on the Train — Paula Hawkins.
Meh. All three protagonists are alternately boring and unlikable. There’s an odd lack of descriptions of the people, the places, or even the weather… that leaves the whole thing feels very ungrounded. It has a predictable outcome for a thriller. Though, if you ever need to give someone a clear example of gas lighting hand them this book.
I seem to be having a run of so-so books having turned down an alley of recommendations that just aren’t doing it for me. I keep looking at the recommendations based on liking All the Light We Cannot See and being misguided into slight novels with flat characters and only fair to middling language.
The Little Paris Book Shop — Nina George.
The premise is adorable. A bookshop on barge in the Seine. The bookseller is more of a book apothecary than a pusher of modern novels. He believes that there is a book for everyone — a book that will cure their ills.
Poor Jean Perdu (yeah, John Lost — not actually that clever) His one great love left him 20 years ago and he’s never even tried to recover. Then one day he donates an old kitchen table to a new neighbor and she finds a letter written by his long-lost love that he refused to open when it arrived 19 years ago. In addition to the lady dumped by her husband without so much as a kitchen table, other characters include a wunderkind author suffering from the sophomore jinx, a couple of cats, and a lovelorn Italian cook. They journey both through the canals of France and their bruised souls. But the book isn’t dark, it’s warm and sunny and full of the scenery of France. Kind of nice for a gloomy day. (Ignore all the two stars reviews. They come from people who consider open relationships to be evil. A rather dull sort of people.) Anyway, I liked it but it’s not one that I am going proselytize for.
Better than Before — Gretchen Rubin.
The lady who wrote the Happiness Project writes about habits. She starts by dividing the world into four kinds of people and then prescribes formulas and strategies for each type to develop habits. It’s a trite rehashing of all the previous advice you’ve ever heard, with predictable anecdotes from the writer — who’s a real weirdo. May be useful for some people but I fall into her Rebel category and the clear subtext of this book is Rebels are screwed. They simply lack the basic accountability to others and will power to develop habits.
Audio books this month:
Station Eleven — Emily St John Mandel — narrator Kirsten Potter
I liked this one when I read it. It’s equally good as a listen. The narrator makes sense as a lot of the book is told from the point of view of a female character.
Farewell My Lovely — Raymond Chandler — narrator Ray Porter.
A classic hard-boiled detective novel. Chandler sounds like a parody of himself at this point but I still revisit him on a irregular basis for the crashing, brash sentences. They read better than they listen. Not the narrator’s fault.
Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson — narrator Jonathan Davis.
Not my favorite Stephenson but a nice comparison to SevenEves which I listened to last month. There’s a huge growth curve between the two. Nice to see even my favorite pros learn as they go. Narrator — decent enough.
I have a huge list queued up for next month which includes two weeks of away from home vacation. Including more Tim O’Brien, Umberto Eco, Christopher Moore, Ernest Cline, and Karen Russel.
What are you reading?
Lara
The Books of July
During July I didn’t get as much reading/listening done as I often do. Summer takes up a lot of reading time.
Listened to:
The Water Knife — Paolo Bacigalupi (Narration by Almarie Guerra — who’s just fine to listen to.)
A violent and thrilling view of a near future filled with the conflicts of the New West- when water is running out and the drought just won’t lift. Sound familiar? Three character’s story arcs meet, cross, and recross. Angel the water knife: an enforcer employed by Las Vegas’ water mogul. Charged with obtaining (frequently by duress) and protecting the water rights that feed the Las Vegas fun machine and the arcologies — nearly self-sustaining living environments filled with water features and the rich who can afford to live there. Marie: a refuge from the dust bowl that is now Texas. One of the new Okies doing what ever she can to get by. Lucy Monroe: a journalist who has come to identify, perhaps too closely, with the residents of the now water starved Phoenix. It’s fiction but not so far-fetched when you consider the amount of corruption and violence that has accompanied the fight for water rights in the West in the past 150 years. It’s also got some pretty graphic violence and some almost tolerable sex scenes.
* Adults only. *
The Things they Carried — Tim O’Brien (narr. — Bryan Cranston aka Walter White or whatever- I’ve never seen the show, but the voice is prefect for OBrien’s stories.)
The pretense that these short stories are true stories continues all the way through the book, right down to its dedication to one of the characters — Rat Kiley. These are stories of Vietnam from the reaction of a kid getting his draft notice, through experiences “in country,” to the stories of those same soldiers at home again and living in a nation that doesn’t know what to do with them.
It’s an interesting meditation on the nature of fiction when a story teller uses it to tell more truth than can possibly be told in straight non-fiction. There are strong parallels to Phil Klay’s Redeployment which uses a similar technique to examine the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. O’Brien is IMO a better writer. As well, the national circumstances in which the soldiers were deployed and returned from deployment are different. And yet the same.
* An easier listen than I thought it would be. *
The Book Thief — Marcus Suzak (abandoned)
A story of a girl in WWII Germany and books. Told from the point of view of Death — which I should have liked and maybe would have liked if I had read the book. But listening to Allan Corduner try to do the voices of children just didn’t work for me.
* good reading book, bad audio book *
Neal Stephenson’s SevenEves (Great narrators. For the first two-thirds of the book Mary Robinette Knowel — a writer I admire whose work I cannot stand to read. It happens. For the last third Will Damron.)
Enjoyed the hell out of it. The moon breaks up and life on earth will end in two years. A race to get some fragment of the human race into space where they can sit out the destruction of earth (some 5000 years worth of it) and keep the species going. It has space ships and robots and nice geeky people and a couple of not so nice people. And a not too surprising ending — but I loved getting there.
There have been complaints in various circles that the Stephenson’s geekery is too much. That all those descriptions and bits of background and occasional info-dumps make the story too slow. I don’t find that to be the case. Especially in the audio-book version. There’s a nice leisurely pace to be sure, but I didn’t find my interest flagging. On the contrary I’m spent entirely too much time plugged into my headphones.
* saga length, epic scale *
Read:
(I’m reading less than I’m listening lately. One of the hazards of summer — too much else to do while it’s daylight and too little dark left at the end of the day to get much reading done.)
The Book of Speculation — Erika Swyler
If you like mermaids, circuses, curses, mysterious books, librarians, and curious family sagas then you should read The Book of Speculation. I can’t explain the title there isn’t really anything speculative about the book. But the story and characters are appealing in a summer read kind of way. And it’s summer so that’s just about right. Not too long a book. Maybe a week’s worth of bedtime reading.
* There are libraries and books! *
The Unnecessary Woman — Rabih Alameddine
It’s easy to become unnecessary in a world in which family is everything and old women only exist as grandmothers. Aaliya lives in Beruit. She is 72 years old, unmarried (divorced actually) has no children and little interest in her remaining family — a step mother and a handful of boorish half brothers. But she loves books, and literature, and philosophy. Her pastime is translating books that she loves into Arabic using a round-about method. All of the books she translates are originally in languages that she doesn’t speak. (She’s fond of the Russians.) To translate them into Arabic she uses several versions of the books in the two other languages that she does speak, English and French. What sort of translation this creates is a barrel of textual monkeys that is never directly addresses but the question of how much of the real you can access through representations lives somewhere at the core of the book. Nominally it is about the everyday and extraordinary crises that attend being female, old, and unusual in a strongly patriarchal society.
The voice of Aaliya is warm, witty, and occasionally baffled by the inconsistencies of the world. The difference between world as it should logically be and as it illogically is.
* You’ll enjoy Aaliya’s company. *
I Believe (after Ron Shelton)
I believe in the image, the line, the stanza, the iambic foot, the perfect word. Assonance, slant rhymes, that the formal forms still have a place in modern poetry. I believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays. I believe in a constitutional amendment outlawing poetry about poetry and the use of the word “suffuse.” I believe in revision, interlinear translations, publishing for readers — not editors, and I believe in long, slow, deep, wet poems that last three days.
Books of June
A writer’s notes about books.
Here are the books I read and listened to in June.
Read:
A Brief History of Seven Killings — Marlon James
In which there are a damned sight more than seven killings. Some of the narrative is true in a broad sense. The politics of Jamaica, the US efforts to direct Latin American and Caribbean activities, the CIA fetish of Cuba, and the involvement of the Columbian cartels in everything — all mostly true. But beyond that? It’s pretty much up in the air, I can’t tell you what’s true and what’s fiction. The attempted assignation of a character known as The Singer (a thinly disguised Bob Marley) anchors the book. All the other actions and actors spin into and out of that one act.
It’s a tough read because of the wild number of POV characters that you have to track (each chapter is helpfully labeled) and the heavy use of patois. You get used to the patois and you spend a certain amount of time flipping back to see where you left that current POV character. It took a lot longer to read than most things and it’s really long to start with. Still, I found the whole thing worth the trouble for the trip to times and places that are utterly unknown to me and the introduction to Marlon James. I have his The Book of Night Women in the To Read pile.
The Book of Phoenix — Nnedi Okorafor
Prequel to her well-known Who Fears Death which I liked a good deal. The term speciMen
Listened to:
Bossy Pants — Tina Fey
Yes, Please — Amy Pohler
Go listen to Bossy Pants. Not read it, listen to it. Really, it’s so much better if you listen to it. Tina Fey playing Tina Fey. It’s all here. Second City, SNL, 30 Rock, the Sarah Palin sketches, and the reality of being female over 40 in comedy. She might be my new idol. Amy Pohler was (and still is on occasion) Tina Fey’s partner in crime. Amy’s book is in some ways funnier. It’s got a lot more gags. Fey’s book is about being funny. Pohler’s book is funny. You know what I mean?
I Shall Wear Midnight — Terry Pratchett
The last of the four Tiffany Aching stories published while Terry Pratchett was alive. (There is one more coming in August.) I picked it to listen to on my daily walk to remind myself where the story had ended and because I remember liking it a lot. Maybe my favorite of the series? Until I remembered Wintersmith which has the better plot, and perhaps the most human Tiffany of the bunch. It certainly has the best of the other witches in it. Okay — I should have listened to Wintersmith…
Inkheart — Cornelia Funke
Why didn’t I like this? Precocious 12 year-old. Okay, that’s enough for me to not like something as much as I might. And yes, I understand that I am about to admit to liking a book about a young boy. Go read the comments on Ocean, the part that I don’t like is when we end up inside the head of the boy without the man.
The rest is okay. A little juvenile — but hey, middle grade book. One of those door-stopper books that middle graders and tweens like. Think Harry Potter but not so good for adults because the adults are one-dimensional. If you have an avid young reader of your own hanging around somewhere they just might love it.
Ocean at the End of the Lane — Neil Gaiman
Thoroughly reviewed a dozen times in a dozen places. Either you like Gaiman’s lush brand of fantasy prose or you don’t. If you do, you won’t be disappointed. Either you like grown up stories that really concern children and vv or you don’t. If you don’t, I suggest Neverland instead.
Sometimes the blended adult/boy voice of the main character leans a little too far to the boy. Yes, it’s a story about a boy, but the story is the explanation of the man and it’s the man’s reaction to it that we’re watching in the meta-view. SO the times when the narrator’s voice totally abandons his adult persona I feel a little cheated.
I started and abandoned The Girl with All Gifts — M.R. Carey.
The set up and the two main characters in the first handful of chapters were interesting. But then it turned into a zombie infection story. There’s just not much you can do with a zombie story that’s going to keep me interested once you’ve hit me with the scientist, the grizzled old military guy, the green military kid, and an idealistic young woman, in an escape vehicle broken down in the middle of nowhere and oh, by the way, there’s a zombie with them. Nope, not even a child zombie that seems to have retained all her human faculties. I stopped listening to it at the end of my walk one day and the next day simply didn’t care what happened to the characters, so I picked up something else.
In non-fiction I’ve picked up the second and third Food52 cookbooks. Recommend the 2nd Volume. Not so enamored of the Genius Recipes, too many over complicated preparations.
As well as iMovie: The Missing Manual. I urge you not to go there.