magpie's shiny things

Heavy on the audio books this month. A lot of lis­ten­ing while knit­ting or oth­er domes­tic activ­i­ties happening.

Books Read:

Lucy and Edgar — Victor Lodato (2017)

I fin­ished this out of a dogged sense of loy­al­ty to the old woman who dies at the begin­ning of the book. The char­ac­ters are stereo­types with­out any sort of depth to make them any­one you care about. In fact oth­er than Edgar, the child at the cen­ter of the book, I could have done with­out any of the oth­ers and their pre­dictable behaviors.
But… like I said dogged loy­al­ty — which is in part what this book is about. There comes a point at about 75% of the way through the book where there looks to be only two pos­si­ble out­comes, and nei­ther one of them is sat­is­fy­ing. I guess I also held on to see if the writer could pull off some­thing mov­ing that was­n’t easy or manip­u­la­tive. And I think he did — most­ly. It’s one of the obvi­ous pos­si­bil­i­ties from the mid­dle of the book but it’s done in a way that keeps you from want­i­ng to the throw the author off of the train. (And I can’t be any more spe­cif­ic about it than that or I’d spoil the book for you.)
Still, I don’t under­stand the huge amount of praise that has been lav­ished on the book by crit­ics and review­ers. It’s just not that inter­est­ing or original.

* one more lousy moth­er and dam­aged son *

Geek Love — Katherine Dunn (2002)

Weird, but I think that was the point. The Binewski tribe is trag­ic in all kinds of ways and a per­fect object les­son about the dan­gers of fam­i­ly. While the char­ac­ters here are freaks on the out­side they point out to us the fact that we are, most of us any­way, freaks on the inside and our world is warped around that freak­ish­ness. I don’t like to think of peo­ple being unself­con­scious­ly mali­cious; though I see the evi­dence of just that sort of behav­ior every day. In this book the hav­oc wreaked by one self­ish ego-maniac (Arturo) is stun­ning­ly wide and entire­ly believ­able. In fact one of the things that I liked most about this book was how believ­able the most out­ra­geous char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions were.
The writ­ing is love­ly enough to keep you involved in the book when the plot and char­ac­ters get beyond your com­fort zone.

* human­i­ty with all its gross, ick­i­ness on the outside *

The Sleep Walker Guide to Dancing — Mira Jacob (2014)

I did­n’t get very far in this, I think because it seemed too famil­iar and I was look­ing for novelty.
* I might pick it up again later. *

Books Listened to:

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender — Leslye Walton (2014)

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

I read this one a cou­ple of years ago. It’s a love­ly sto­ry with amus­ing and intrigu­ing char­ac­ters. The sto­ry begins with Ava’s grand­moth­er’s trag­ic, ghost-filled fam­i­ly his­to­ry and con­tin­ues on to describe a line of women with what might be char­i­ta­bly con­sid­ered to have ter­ri­ble luck in love, lead­ing up the birth of the twins Ava and Henry. Ava is born with wings and Henry with what we might assume is autism but by the end of the book seems more like a prophet­ic gift of mute­ness. As Ava grows her wings come to define and cir­cum­scribe her place in the world. The trag­ic end­ing you expect is avert­ed, but only nar­row­ly, and only after a good deal of dam­age is done. But hope is a thing with wings. And so is Ava.
The writ­ing is clear and glis­tens with the sub­tle rain washed hues of the Seattle climate.
The nar­ra­tion is quite good. Worth a lis­ten if you haven’t read the book already.

* loved it again *

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. — Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (2017)

Narration: Cast of dozens :)

The new Stephenson. The title char­ac­ter — one Melisande Stokes an under­paid under appre­ci­at­ed lec­tur­er in lin­guis­tics — finds her­self involved with a mys­te­ri­ous gov­ern­ment agency and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mag­ic in the mun­dane world. There fol­lows the usu­al byzan­tine plot and riotous com­pli­ca­tion of details that I love in a Stephenson book.
One of the few writ­ers that I auto­mat­i­cal­ly lis­ten to rather than read. I think that his in-depth asides work best if you are forced to give them equal weight with the nar­ra­tive and that is most eas­i­ly done when the woods are read to you.
DODO is good clean — slight­ly fan­tas­tic fun. A change from Stephenson’s most recent work SevenEves which was any­thing but light-hearted. The col­lab­o­ra­tion is seam­less, with no jumps from one writer to the other.
Narration is good, though the accents are a bit over done.
(Oddly there is a paint­ing called Melisande by a woman named Mariane Stokes — this can­not be a coin­ci­dence, not in a Stephenson book.)

* there are cat’s Schrodinger and otherwise *

Middlesex — Jeffery Eugenides (2002)

Narration: Kristoffer Tabori

Briefly reviewed in September 2015.  I found the book just as enjoy­able the sec­ond time around. Perhaps more so because I have become more aware of the con­ver­sa­tions sur­round­ing sex, gen­der, and iden­ti­ty and appre­ci­at­ed the light touch that the author uses in insist­ing that we look more close­ly at our assumptions.
Narration is good, and the voice used is just ambigu­ous enough to make the flu­id gen­der of Cal(liope) audible.

* the sins of the old coun­try come home to roost in mid­dle class Detroit *

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-20th 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 18th 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 18th 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 *