Fran: T is for "Is it too much to ask to go out with a bang and not a wimper?!"

So I really wanted my very last letter to be something spectacular.  This post is about how I read a bunch of books by authors with last names that begin with T and how I am still looking for a good one, but will close out the alphabet game anyway.  It's time to feel like I can read other things and not be guilty about taking time away from this project.

1. Ahmet Hamdi Tasnipar, The Time Regulation Institute. 
Tasnipar is billed as the most influential Turkish writer of the modern period so I picked this up as a book which might fulfill the T in a significant manner.  I'm mildly embarrassed to say that I put it down again about 50 pages in.  The main character, Hayri Irdal, is (supposedly) a normal modern man, surrounded by quirky eccentrics, discusses his move from the Department of Justice Medical Facility to the Time Regulation Institute where he works synchronizing clocks and watches and passing fines for time idiosyncrasies.   

Why I stopped: a) the prose style is difficult--Random House describes it in their blurb as

 "Sentences unfold in sinuous coils of multiplying clauses, extended metaphors, hyperbolic exclamations, and an imaginative brio rarely surpassed in modern fiction."  

I think they just wanted to use the word "brio" because I found it convoluted and self-conscious, not possessing of great energy and self-confidence.  b) there is a high level of expectation that you understand modern Turkish history.  In this early section, I really felt I would need to study up just to understand the situation. c) the ideological point of this book is to satirize the modern world and its conflict with the traditional Turkish social/philosophical context.  I have very little tolerance for the bureaucracy that just exists to justify its existence.  I didn't like Seinfeld, either.

2) Karin Tanabe, The List
I like politics.  I like smart young women protagonists.  I should have liked this book.  I stopped about a third of the way in.
Why I stopped: Mostly this book got up my craw in a number of ways.  Adrienne Brown, the young Wellesley grad leaves her job at Town and Country to write for the political info/gossip rag, The Capitolist.  She's unprepared, even after her seasoning as a writer, for the brutal ridiculous demands of the Capitolist (where she's apparently always wanted to work).  Abusive job sites are not for me--file good stories rather than accede to the demand to file a note/story every hour and a half.  She goes home and lives with her super-rich influential family (albeit in the loft above the stables, poor baby); the ridiculous money scene is not interesting to me.  It makes me mad when struggling 20-somethings in movies set in New York live in gorgeous apartments; when I worked for one of the premier SF law firms, making a reasonable out-of-college pay, I lived in a non-descript building in a neighborhood with a poor reputation with furniture from Sal's (the Salvation Army) for my 20-something apartment.  The politics in the book are superficial; no one is in the business of politics or writing about politics because they believe in anything.  And by the time I got to the crux of the plot where Adrienne stumbles on the juicy political affair between a co-worker and a senator, I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters.

3) Anthony Trollope, Ralph the Heir
I'm a fan of 19th c. English writers--Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Gaskell. I'd never read any Trollope.  The description sounded mildly amusing and suitably trashy when I was browsing free downloads beginning with T on the ipad.  Had I known.
Why I am still barely chugging along but have essentially stopped:

Trollope himself called it “one of the worst novels I have written,” that it justified the dictum that “a novelist after fifty should not write love-stories.” In his autobiography, he notes that the two main heroes — both, somewhat inconveniently, named Ralph Newton — have no life, and he purports not even to remember the book’s heroines. (from Rob Horning's review essay linked in the title)

I'd pretty much decided this for myself when I went cruising Google for thoughts on this novel.  I had trouble keeping one Ralph Newton separate from the other.  And Trollope's point was crystal clear--the bad, spendthrift layabout Ralph Newton is going to inherit even though he doesn't deserve to and the good honorable Ralph Newton, on the verge of buying out the estate to inherit it, will lose out.  The women are awful flat characters--the plain elder sister who knows she will get no one and so is resolved to make her sister happy, the sister in love with the bad Ralph, the mysterious (but English blonde) cousin from the West Indies, the daughter of the breeches-maker who bad Ralph may have to marry in order to get money (he doesn't because Trollope has to maintain social propriety--aristocrats only marry aristocrats, not tradesman's daughters).  I haven't gotten far into Trollope's thinly veiled, own political stand for Parliament but I'm having a hard time differentiating among characters that I don't really like.

4) Sarah Loudin Thomas, Miracle in a Dry Season
I finished this book because, crikey, how could I be so miserable at this letter?!
I like romances.  I especially like the sort of romances where the woman has a job that she's trying to succeed at because she loves it and is good at it despite odds against her and in the course of doing that job, finds love with an at-first unlikely man.  I'm modern enough to want a little (or a lot) of physical thrill and traditional enough to want this true pairing to wind up with major commitment/marriage. I don't mind a tinge of prayer/commitment to faith but I want it to be part of a well rounded soul who lives in the world and grapples with modern life.
Why I kept chugging at this until it was eventually done: the writing is good (not great, but compelling enough).  The characters are interesting as is the setting of 1950s small-town West Virginia (Wise, where I've been).  The magical realism of the heroine is potentially really interesting: Perla Long can feed as many or as few as she needs to with the food she's prepared (paralleling Christ's feeding of the 5,000).  It happens in a drought season that puts tremendous pressure on the agricultural community.
What really annoyed me: The main characters are tremendously perfect, even in their imperfection.  Perla's had a child out of wedlock but we get no details of that relationship because Perla's in repentance so we're supposed to forgive her sin and not want to gossip about it.  Her love for the male lead, Casewell Phillips, once slews toward the physical as she looks at his hands and the author immediately shuts that down with a line of how she wouldn't think of that now.  Casewell not only thinks of God but prays on his knees every night without fail.  Eventually, he takes the place of the flawed persecuting preacher (who leaves town rather than face his sin, which is largely opposing Perla out of pride and misunderstanding of her God-given gift).  There is a tremendous sense in this book that the reader cannot hope to be as good as the good people and wouldn't want to be as flawed as the flawed people.  I had tremendous trouble identifying with the characters--which in a good romance is something you want.

So technically, I finished the letter T and thus am at the end of my alphabet reading.  Did I pick up a T author at the library yesterday? Yup.  Because I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

Ed: J is for Jensen

Our AtoZ project has, as it is designed to do, compelled me to read books by writers I hadn’t previously read, and in many cases hadn’t previously heard of. I had never read anything by Liz Jensen, for instance, when I was perusing the local library’s J shelf, and of the three or four books that looked interesting, I picked up Ark Baby. So that’s a plus for the project, because I quite enjoyed it.

It was very James Morrow-ish, which is a good thing in my eyes, even though I think it wasn’t, in the end, quite up to the standard of Rabelaisian humour in the better James Morrow books. Still and all: provocative, funny, surprising, obnoxious, and with rococo sentences that get lost in metaphorical bric-a-brac. Or bric-a-bracical metaphor. Something like that, anyway.

The book is largely sewn together from two parts, the successful part and the not-altogether-successful part, the latter of which follows a main character who is neither likeable nor intelligent, which makes following him a chore, frankly. This half also bears the weight of the futuristic elements: for unexplained and indeed inexplicable reasons, the residents of the British Isles have become entirely sterile, and the sun is therefore setting on Britishness. The better half (in my arrogant one, at any rate) is set in Victorian times, we follow two characters in this part, both moderately likeable, as they approach each other and their inevitable romantic pairing. The two parts are linked thematically and by concern, the descendants of one showing up in the other, by a taxidermists’ figures, and by probably my favorite character in the thing: the Empress of Laudanum, who in the early part is racked with prophecies of the endtimes, whose hideous death pushes forward the narrative more than anything else, and who haunts the modern section with increasing indifference to the end of the world. I liked her quite a bit, and wish in fact that she had returned at the very end to pass judgment on the ending of the book. Ah, well.

The book was also filled—packed—with monkeys and apes, and references not only to evolution but to our human relationship to our primate brethren. Not because Ms. Jensen in interested in monkeys, I think, but to provoke us to wonder: do we care, really, about the elusive definition of humanity? Are we satisfied to know it when we see it? If humanity, Homo Sapiens as we jocularly call ourselves, turns out to be an evolutionary dead end and Nature starts selecting elsewhere… so what, really?

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: V is for Valentine

V is for Valentine, Genevieve Valentine, and her book Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

This is a weird book--very literary, almost poetic--set in a dystopia of a ruined world with little city-states.  The circus travels from place to place and are very much the close-knit group coming into communities where they don't fit.  In this respect, Valentine keeps the conventions of the circus--attracting the weird and misfits, who bond together because they cannot bond elsewhere.  The ringleader is Boss--a woman with a tragic background that gives her strange powers to create the mechanical human hybrids of the Circus Tresaulti; Boss takes the broken bodies of people, often near death, and infuses them with machinery.  The most glorious characters include Panadrome, the human headed music box, Alec and Bird, characters who (at different points) are created with wings, Ayers the strong man able to do feats beyond normal because of his machinery.  Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of Little George, the circus gofer, who longs for the mechanization that the rest of the circus has and which Boss denies him (he wears fake metal on his legs when they stop in towns).  Valentine plays this feeling as well with Stenos--the man who partners with Bird because he longs himself for the wings that make her Bird.

The first 2/3rds of the book are somewhat slow and I found myself slogging through.  The last section is a set piece in which Boss, having been captured by the mayor of one of the towns who hopes to use her power for his own army, is rescued by the circus.  The conflicts between Bird and Stenos, between Elena (the brass boned trapeze artist) and almost everyone else, the new role for Little George (which I will not spoil) come to a head in this section.  Perhaps it's my flaw as a reader that I was reading for plot and so really felt that I had been rewarded by something finally happening in this book. 

Literary science fiction/fantasy (a Nebula award short-listed book); interesting world creation; somewhat disappointing overall.

Ed: Q is for Quennell

I admit that I picked up Peter Quennell’s The Wanton Chase in part because I need a Q for my author AtoZ. I still have J, O, U, V, X and Y to go, if y’all want to make recommendations, although I have two Js out from the library already, and I should probably start one of them, as soon as I finish the Pratchett. Anyway, I needed a Q and although I had never heard of Mr. Quennell, as far as I knew, he qualified. And it’s a hell of a title, innit? I don’t know if it counts as judging a book by its cover (which I certainly do and encourage people to do) but that’s why I picked it. Well, and the title page said it was an autobiography that picked up in 1939, and I knew from where it was in the library that it was a British author, so, you know, worth a shot, right?

It turns out that Mr. Quennell was one of those dines-with-more-famous-authors authors, which of course is right up my proverbial. Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Kingsly Amis, Constantin Brancusi, Augustus John, Esmond Lord Rothermere and Ian Fleming, George Duthuit, George Moore and Emerald Cunard, uswusf. I eat that shit up with a spoon. On the other hand, while the writing style and tone were amusing enough, the anecdotes were carefully anodyne and sometimes instead of coming to a conclusion just drifted away to nothing. It’s an odd book, that way; he doesn’t seem to get the point of his own stories.

The other thing about the book that really struck me was the way the mores have changed in fifty years or so. Marital infidelity is taken as a matter of course, and doesn’t reflect poorly on the unfaithful spouse. Sexual attraction toward the young, even to adolescents, is a quirk rather than a disease; he is amused rather than appalled. Racism, of course, both explicit and implicit. And then: his total blindness to working people of any kind, his inability to see waiters, servants or foreigners as humans, and his utter indifference to suffering of any kind. The callousness is a pose, of course, but that just begs the question: the mores have changed so much that a pose of indifference is strange and unpleasant, as opposed to… amusing?

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: T is for Thurber

I had somehow never read The 13 Clocks. I'm not sure why. I read a lot of Thurber as a kid, and I read more as an adult. I knew about this one as Thurber writing a Thurberish story of a prince in disguise, a curse, a wicked Duke, a quest, all that sort of thing. And people love it. Neil Gaiman loves it.

I didn't love it. I loved bits of it, mostly individual sentences, but I didn't really love the thing in itself. I'm not sure why.

Digression: I have recently started using the phrase curate's egg a lot. Do y'all know the phrase? It's from a Punch cartoon titled True Humility in which a humble curate, at tea with his bishop, assures his reverend boss that parts of his egg are excellent. When I call something a curate's egg, I'm saying that there were good bits, but that it didn't quite work as a whole thing. I don't know if I've been saying it frequently of late because I have been seeing and reading an unusual amount of stuff that doesn't quite work for me, or because I have been finding an unusual amount of excellent parts in the usual rubbish I come across. End Digression.

Maybe the reason I didn't love it was its adherence to the gender roles of This Kind Of Thing. As a child of the women's-lib 70s, and as a father in the 21st Century, I have grown used to these stories subverting those gender roles. The maiden's total lack of agency (or indeed entity) seemed like a hole in the book, and the overwhelming masculinity of the village made me sigh a bit. That may have been enough to put me in the wrong mood to be charmed. And loving something like this is just not as likely if you're in the wrong mood. Ah, well.

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: L is for LaBute

I hated Woyzeck. I oughtn’t to be surprised, I suppose—I’ve never finished reading any of Neil LaBute’s plays before, and I’ve never finished reading any of the translations of Georg Büchner’s play before, either. I thought I would give it a try, though.

I know that the fragments that make up the original playscript form a tremendously influential piece of writing, and that theatrical expressionism and modern drama may well date from the discovery of the thing. I dunno. It’s awful, and I don’t see any merit in it. The language, the situations, the characters, the theater. It seems as if it would be somewhere between depressing and boring, unless it were laughable. Most likely it would fall into the irritatingly superior category. I mean: yes, various despicable people treat poor Woyzeck cruelly and drive him to madness and murder, it’s terrible what such people do, tsk tsk tsk. I’m glad I don’t know anyone like that. And you don’t. I swear to you, you don’t know anyone like any of the men in this play.

I don’t see any wit in Mr. LaBute’s adaptation, either. It doesn’t even seem to be a great part for an actor. I mean, it could be, with enough time for the poor sap to run around wordlessly and wildly breaking down whilst the rest of the cast shouts at him, but… yicch.

Thank you,
-E.

Fran: U is for Ursu

I had some trouble finding a "U"--the public library is heavy on John Updike and Leon Uris, two authors I had read before, didn't feel particularly connected to, and whose rows of books make it feel daunting to pick just one.  I went to the teen room and found Anne Ursu's book, Breadcrumbs.

Hazel is best friends with Jack as they enter their 5th grade year.  Both children are undergoing serious life events at home (Hazel's father has left and her parents divorced; Jack's mother is severely depressed and dysfunctional as a result).  Additionally, they are feeling the pressure of gender conformity in school, especially on their friendship.  Against this backdrop of very real tween life, is the magic of fairy tale worlds--an imp with a distorting mirror that breaks creates an event that makes Jack look to the Snow Queen (who lures him from his world to hers), the Snow Queen herself, shoes that cause the dancer to dance to death, animal skins that transform the wearer, wizards, witches, transformed children.  Hazel braves the forest and the magic to bring Jack home.

There is much that is lovely in this book.  Hazel is an Indian, adopted by a white family; she is aware of her difference because of the emphasis placed on it by those around her.  Ursu is aware of the shifts in perception as we understand some of these things for the first time.  Describing an assignment Hazel is given in school, Ursu writes:

Hazel stared at the paint-splotted table in front of her.  There was a time when she would have loved this assignment, when she had a thousand made-up places at her fingertips just waiting for someone to ask to see them.  But now she could think of nothing.  There were so many real places in the world,  and they had so much weight to them.  There were front hallways and bus stops and the space on the other side of classroom doors.  There were lonely big slides and microscopically out of line desks and lunch tables that survived gravity shifts. How could anyone ever make something up?

The magic of fairy tales is meant to feel real, in a sinister Brothers Grimm way--especially because for Ursu and her characters, fairy tales are about longing.  About being given your heart's desire and how it changes you; about longing that drives us on incredible quests and drives us to continue against odds.  And how desires sometimes drive us to want more, remaining always unfulfilled.  And--I suppose--how the ways in which fairy tale desires relate to our real world desires and drive us back older, sadder, wiser but better able to see the positives in our own lives.

There are some issues--these themes of longing and desire/real world vs. fairy world aren't always intermeshed as well as they might be.  The first half of the book feels short on magic whereas the second half feels short on reality; I wanted more integration of the two.  Reading as an adult, the references to fairy tales in the non-magic part ("like Narnia") were more annoying; I assume a tween audience might need more of the markers to indicate connections.  Illustrations are balanced in both halves of the book but felt weighted to the magic half. 

On the whole, however, a quick read with much to recommend it!

Ed: D is for de los Santos and Teague

OK, I’ll start this one by telling y’all about this odd coincidence: I picked up Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague from the YA shelf because I thought it looked good and because I needed both a D and a T. Not that I can count it for both, but one or the other, right? Anyway, I didn’t recognize either of the names, but the cover looked all right and the blurb was from Ingrid Law, and then also I was at the library, right? So what the hell.

It turns out that not only has Fran read one of Marisa de los Santos’ books, but it was her D book back in February. So, what I think is that there’s someone in the library who is a big Marisa de los Santos fan and had picked up the novels for the fiction collection and liked ’em, so when she (and her husband) wrote a YA book, the library got that, too. And good for them, because it’s a hell of a book.

First of all, it’s got a terrific sense of place. It’s set a Northern Arizona mining town, edge of the desert, edge of the mountains. Second, it’s got a terrific sense of history. That’s connected to the first, probably, in that it’s difficult to have a sense of place without it, but they get the particular mining-town history of Arizona right. Which is connected to the third thing, that I love it when a YASF book turns out to be full of old labor-left stuff, real rabble-rousing material that brings the iniquities of the Company right down to the present day. Hydraulic fracturing is killing people, yes, and you should believe that because mining companies have been killing people to make a buck for a couple of hundred years, now.

Having said that, I am disappointed, a little anyway, that Our Hero (and she’s a good character, too, even if perhaps just a trifle too quirky for my tastes at the moment) succeeds in the end by melting the heart of an old evildoer. I wanted a political victory. The kids reading this book should (in my opinion) learn of the tremendous achievement that was moving our labor conflict from machine guns to ballot boxes; we should politicize the fuck out of every dead miner and every spoiled river and every fracking earthquake so that it doesn’t come down to guns again. Because those things kill people, too.

But then, I feel bad about complaining—no kid would really read this book and think Why bother joining a union or voting or calling my congressman, I’ll just melt the heart of an evildoer. No, kids will read this book (I hope they will) and think the bastard mine-owners are still killing people to make a buck.

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: F is for Frank

I suspect I would have read Barney Frank’s book even if I didn’t need an F for my A-to-Z year. And starting it, I would certainly have finished it; it’s a hell of a book. He’s a funny man, of course, and that helps, but he’s also a very smart man and a man with a long and fascinating history in public service. And, I suppose, it helps that I agree with him 90% of the time or more, both on policy substance and on process efficacy. I completely agree with his insistence on the benefits of incremental change, both because incremental improvements are real improvements that help real people and because each incremental improvement in a particular policy area makes it a little easier to make the next one. He has lived this history with LGBT rights; he has in the last twenty-five years seen it work the other way on affordable housing—and has also seen how refusal to accept incremental change and compromise is counterproductive, on both sides. It’s fascinating.

Where I disagree with him, I think, is in his dismissal of events and activities outside politics, and their ability to move public opinion and lead to change in people’s real lives and in their politics. He is dismissive—contemptuous is not too strong a word, I think—of protests and marches and rallies. He says (and he writes strikingly, I admire his writing) that if you have been to an event with people who agree with you, and you feel good about yourself afterward, then you almost certainly haven’t achieved anything. We all would like to believe that isn’t so, but… I think it is probably mostly so. Or at least somewhat so. Alas.

On the other hand, protests and marches and rallies can certainly go alongside a conventional inside political effort. Barney Frank does recognize this, although he is deeply skeptical that the groups holding the rallies will have the discipline to go through with it, and that’s from personal experience I have to believe. But when it happens, I think it works very well indeed. Let’s take, for example, the minimum wage fight, where street protests and rallies have been coupled with some very strong state and local legislative lobbying. Or, alternately, the T.E.A. Party movement, which successfully coupled political theater with direct mail to stymie a second economic stimulus package and make the sequester bite into popular public spending programs. And then—Gavin Newsom’s ridiculous and irresponsible decision to authorize same-sex marriage in San Francisco in 2004—did it make it easier for the other guys to pass Proposition 8? Did it delay legal same-sex marriage nation-wide? Barney Frank believes it did; I can’t really argue it. But I can’t say I regret that it happened, either.

I had for years talked about the Two Browns theory of government—you need Willie, who is willing—eager—to sell out to corporations and special interests to collect the crumbs of the deal for his own supporters, and you need Jerry, who is willing to forego alliances and give up power and influence in order to make unpopular points and maintain independence and freedom from corruption. Of course, that was two or three Jerry Browns ago, before he decided he actually was interested in governing, so the whole theory is shot to hell, but the point is that the two attitudes are both necessary. Without the Willie Browns you get no actual governance, and the lives of the people in the area are that much worse. Without the—well, without the, let’s say, Bernie Sanderses, or on the other side, I dunno, the Mick Mulvaneys?—without the uncompromising standers on principle, there’s little pressure on the folk sitting across the table from the Willie Browns, and the Willie Browns sell out for less and less.

If I were a legislator (and no, that would be gruesome and awful) I would hope to be a Barney Frank, a man who managed to maintain both his principles and his compromises, who always kept his eyes on his Henny Youngman lodestar: compared to what? Anything can be made better, any slide to the worse can be halted or at least slowed. People can be helped and any progress is progress. But the point is not the compromise, the point is the people. He helped an awful lot of them along the way.

And, you know, it’s hard not to read the current fiasco in the House—with the so-called House Freedom Caucus going all-in to prevent legislating from occurring at all—in light of Barney Frank’s career and his very real accomplishments as a consummate compromiser.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: F is for Furnivall

Closing in on my 26...F is for Kate Furnivall who wrote the book, The Jewel of St. Petersburg, a prequel to The Russian Concubine in terms of plot, though written afterwards.  Set in Russia of 1910, it leads into the violence of the eventual Revolution, following characters of varying social classes.  The heroine, Valentina, is born to her White Russian life but, through the actions of rebel terrorists, is driven to "make something more of herself".  She dedicates herself to learning nursing.  She falls in love with a Danish engineer, who despite working for the Tsar, is himself dedicated to improving the lot of the poor workers by building sewer tunnels.  Furnivall tells a sweeping tale, interweaving chauffeur provocateurs and bizarrely apolitical/both sided Cossacks and snooty Hussars, with the backdrop of the decaying Russian society.

I wanted to like this book.  I was pleased by the elements where she drew on complicated Bolshevik/Menshavik history to suggest that the Revolution does not happen overnight.  But the characters do seem flat--an after effect, perhaps, of having written the prequel after their characters have taken shape in other novels.  Valentina survives a lot because she's beautiful with flashing dark eyes.  Valentina's governing minister father is a particular caricature--decadent, greedy, corrupt, old fashioned in values especially towards women, short sighted.  The writing was occasionally engaging but then there would be suddenly points where the writer seemed to lose interest, where a scene should have continued but just stops and then jumps quickly to the next scene.

Meh.  On the whole, just average.

Ed: W is for Walton

I enjoyed Jo Walton’s My Real Child enormously. I found it sweet, absorbing and problematic; I didn’t want it to end.

The end was always going to be a problem, wasn’t it? When a novel is told, more or less, in flashback from the point of view of an elderly person with Alzheimer’s-related dementia, eventually that’s going to be a problem. And in this book, where the tension between two stories—two versions of a life, and a world that life takes place within—is the primary narrative tension, well, there is no satisfactory way of resolving it, is there? If there were, the book wouldn’t work as well. I didn’t want the book to end because I wanted to stay and spend more time with the folk in the book, yes, but also because I knew I would be disappointed in the ending, no matter what.

The central theme—well, the theme I think is central, anyway—is very meta: it’s an alternate history story where the alternate history barely matters. The difference in war, politics, and scientific progress are peripheral to the main character’s life. They do affect it—I will refrain from plot spoilers, I suppose, but World Events make a difference in the lives of our friends only indirectly, and often well after the fact. As they often do in my own life—the most closely the destruction of the World Trade Center has touched me, for instance, has been years after, when friends have been arrested for things that wouldn’t have drawn notice beforehand. Portraying that sort of thing is a critique of the Great Man focus that alternate-history stories often take, and of the Great Man stories that we tell ourselves about the actual world. I’d call it an inherently feminist argument, but it’s more than that; it’s a critique of the reach of politics in general. And while I’m not altogether in agreement with it, it’s a powerful one.

All of which lies underneath a terrific book about people that I enjoyed spending time with.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: L is for Lake

The late Jay Lake's book, Mainspring, was a complicated read.  It's an alternative history with a steampunk setting and an adventure feel.  The main character, Hethor Jacques, is a clockmaker's apprentice and in the first pages is charged with finding the Key Perilous by the archangel Gabriel because the Clockwork of the World is running down.  His quest rapidly set in motion by the competing theologies of those who believe God to be an active clock maker, involved in Creation, and those who seek to tear down the orbital clockwork of the world and free man to his own ingenuity, Hethor travels from New Haven to Boston to the equatorial regions where the Wall divides industrial North and magical/pastoral-Edenic South.  The South is filled with unusual creatures and part of this book is Hethor's discovery of his own racism/bigotry/errors.  Hethor drives onward to the South Pole to the Mainspring to fulfill his quest.

I found it slow-going but definitely worth continuing.  I liked the idea of "Brass Christianity"--this steampunk rendition of God as an actual clockmaker winding the world.  I was--as an art historian who reads a lot of theology--disappointed by the lack of nuance in some of the characters and Lake's lack of interest in explaining more deeply the concept of the worldview.  One of the things that I wish were clearer is the reason for selecting Hethor--he hears the sound of the world the way a clockmaker hears the watch mechanism and when he's in the South, that becomes a magic shaping/constructing force.

But I think part of the sacrifice of the theology was for the adventure (a la Edgar Rice Burroughs).  The fancy of the Candlepit where Hethor is held captive, the airship on which he sails, the scary winged creatures who carry him off, the jungle cities of immense size and shaping, the "correct people" who live in the Southern Hemisphere--straight out of the Burroughs kinds of worlds (King Solomon's Mines, Tarzan, etc.). 

The book has problems--mired in the sexism and colonialism of the steampunk alternate history and the Christian frame, Lake chooses to some extent to live in those stereotypes (few women of real character, Aryella--the "correct person" with whom Hethor falls in love and helps him on his quest--is an Eve Type).  And Hethor (our connection as readers) learns from some of his prejudices--especially in learning to love the correct people--but is ultimately contained in this steampunk Edwardian aesthetic/worldview, rather than busting out of it to create something fully new.

Mike Perschon has a much longer review on his site.

Fran: E is for Evans

F, L, T, U, V...all the letters that are left for me!

E is for Lissa Evans and her 'tween book, Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (published in the UK as Small Change for Stuart).  I was browsing with Max in the Tween Room in our library--where they put the fiction for kids like him: ready for more advanced reading but not necessarily ready for young adult situations or language.  As you might predict, the room is heavy on sci-fi and fantasy. (Can I just get a shout out for the Noah Webster Library that is so cool as to have a Tween Room, and many awesome other things?  It's on my list of the top ten reasons to live here.)

I picked this up because of the cover mainly but was intrigued by the setting of magician's tools that is at the center of this mystery.  Our hero, Stuart Horten (S. Horten or Shorten), is a young boy moved to his father's childhood town, discovering the family mysterious disappearance of his great-uncle "Teeny Tiny Tony Horten".  Tony set up an elaborate puzzle, involving the various coin-op mechanisms (weight-guessing machines, toffee-distributing machines, puzzle boxes, etc.), before disappearing in hopes that his nephew (Stuart's dad) would find the secret.  It falls to Stuart to puzzle it out, as Stuart's father is simply not that kind of boy (and, as a parent reading this, one thing that is lovely is the sense in which it is OK that Stuart's dad is one kind of man and puzzler--crosswords--and that Stuart is different and that's ok too).

This is sort of in line with a number of tween puzzle novels, like Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett and Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach (both of which I read back when Brynnen was 10 and we were buying books at the Scholastic Book Fair at school).  The puzzles are not presented for the reader to solve, however; we live them through Stuart.

While Stuart himself is an engaging character, several others are quirky without depth, especially the nearly identical triplets (April, May, and June), and the villain, Jeannie, and her henchman, Clifford.  I doubt I would care that much if I were ten, but I did care because I'm not ten.

Finally, the twist of real magic at the end of the book was jarring.  There is no sense of magic as being real in this world; we focus on the machines and the tricks of magicians so much that the idea that magic could have a real component doesn't seem to work for me.  Again, I wonder if this is because I'm an adult and want to have some sense of the magic alive in the world BEFORE the plot twist at the very end.  Maybe, if I were 10 and reading this, I would just fall into the reality of the magic and its possibilities the way Stuart does.

Ultimately--read this when your 10, not...more.

Fran: X is for Xinran

I discovered the short read, Sky Burial, by the Chinese journalist and novelist Xinran, while (obviously) searching for an X.

Shu Wen is a Chinese woman who loves and marries another Chinese doctor, Kejun.  It is the 1950s and the People's Liberation Army is off to Tibet to liberate the territory for China.  Her husband is sent to care for soldiers and soon she receives a notice of his death.  Irregularities in the notice and her grief compel her to trace his path, in hopes of finding him (or greater news of his death).  The path is not smooth however and she finds herself apart from the soldiers, meeting a Tibetan woman Zhouma who also speaks Chinese who becomes a friend and counselor, living for years with a Tibetan nomadic family, and--eventually--finding news of Kejun decades after the end of the war.

The book is clearly balanced on several themes--straight up love/romance of a woman drawn to her husband even past death, women's class/social place in both China and Tibet, belief and experience of other cultures.  The friction and misunderstanding Mao's China has and creates during the Cultural Revolution is replaced for Wen by living in Buddhist Tibet for 40 years but the story is punctuated by smaller incidents of confusion.  The sky burial referenced in the title is the Tibetan practice of allowing vultures and scavenger birds to eat the corpse, a practice that the "modern" Chinese find abhorrent; it is that misunderstanding that causes the tragedy of Kejun's life and death, the hermit Qiangba's "death" and salvation.

But it seems to me that this is also framed in the context of storytelling--Wen tells her story to Xinran (who tells it to us).  The (lack of ) story of Kejun motivates Wen to go to Tibet and to spend her life searching for it.  The story of Zhouma and her lost love, a groom dubbed Tienanmen, interleaves with Wen's.  The inability to share her story past language and cultural boundaries drives much of the actual plot.  And it is a story at the end--when Qiangba tells her what happened to Kejun--that resolves the crisis.

An interesting and quick read.  As a Westerner though, I wondered how much of my suspicion (shared by this reviewer) of narrators (Xinran herself most particularly for telling us this remarkable story--how could it be true? what is she leaving out?) and the experience of Wen living in nomadic Tibet for 30+ years (how could she not learn of the outside world sometimes? how could she bear this isolation?  what's missing in Wen's story?) is founded on cultural misunderstandings of storytelling and translation.

Fran: M is for Massey

Misty Massey has a pirate book, Mad Kestrel, which I read for my "M" book.

It took some time to get into the book.  It started a bit slow, a standard pirate book, full of "color" on ship board.  I liked having a female protagonist in the aggressively male world of pirates.  Things picked up quickly with the appearance of the mysterious stranger (who is clearly not all he seems), the arrest of Capt. Binns and the race for Kestrel to escape the soldiers, an attempted kidnapping, a boat-napping, swords, mutiny, strange packages, etc.

My main complaint is that the world has magic but that the way that the magic is written is overly-downplayed and somewhat tangential to the book.  We're told (on the back cover so it isn't a surprise) that the fearsome group of magic users, the Danisobans, rip children from their parents and raise them as magic users for the king.  Kestrel's parents die getting her away from them and now she hates and fears/denies the magic that is part of her very being.  But we never meet a Danisoban.  And magic use seems quite distant except for Kestrel's extraordinary powers and a few magic items used by the mysterious stranger.  Magic felt tacked on to the main plot line.

But...Good female character, strong and passionate and clever; interesting main characters, a very visual chase as the main activity of the book.  Swashbuckling and fine as a light read.

Fran: G is not really for Gholson but Gregson

Again, browsing the library shelves, I pick up a bunch of likely Gs.  The first was Christien Gholson, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind, which had an entrancing title and a good blurb:

This is the story of A Fish Trapped inside the Wind.
It all begins in a small town in Belgium near the French border on the morning of the festival of St. Woelfred. There are dead fish scattered everywhere seemingly blown in by the wind. The empty quarries of Villon are soon to be used as toxic waste dumps. Are the fish a sign from the saint or a trick played by Contexture, the dance group who once got naked at the Vatican?
The lives of six people who live in the town are about to be changed forever.
A story with magic and fish… and the lost poems of Rimbaud.

I expected to like it more than my other G book.  It turned out to be a little character study, with a lot of fish rotting about town and little resolution, and precious little Rimbaud (as far as I could figure).  Rimbaud once lived in Villon and the lost poems are in their physical pages objects of interest, but there's no quotations from Rimbaud, no interest in the words (unless the references are so oblique that the general populous doesn't get them).  St. Woelfred is also tangential.  Gholson writes well but I found myself reaching the end of the book and wondering "interesting people but so what?".  I don't think that's the reaction you want to have at the end.

So I picked up my other G: Julia Gregson, Band of Angels.  At least I recognized this as a reference to early nursing under Florence Nightengale.  Florence is a tangential character as we follow a Welsh landed-gentry girl who runs away to become a nurse in London and then finds herself in the Crimea with the British wounded.  There's a romance (without explicit scenes, not the interest of the author) that runs through it--her friend from home similarly circuitously ends up in the Crimea with horses he's trained.  On the whole, it was a fairly compelling historicized romance and I enjoyed it a good deal more than the fish.

Fran: Z is for Zabytko

Irene Zabytko's novel, The Sky Unwashed, is set in the Ukraine at the time of the Chernobyl disaster.  Marusia is an old widow who lives with her son and daughter-in-law and their two children; Yurko, her son, and Zosia, his wife, both work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, like so many of the villagers.  Zabytko's novel looks at the disaster not from the immediate site but from the periphery leading edge--Marusia sees the family's and village's evacuation from the area in the chaos of Soviet bureaucracy, the radiation poisoning and subsidiary problems in her son that cause his death, the loss of her focus.  And her return to her village, and the return of other old women, is interesting.

Though I picked this just to get a Z author, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I'm fascinated by the healing of the area.  I would heartily recommend the presentation of Swarthmore alum Mike Rothbart who photographed the area.

Ed: Ž is for Žantovský

I’m mostly interested in Vaclav Havel as a playwright and a theatrical figure. I love his stuff; I love the sort of thing he does. I’d love to play in a production of The Memorandum; I’m too old to play the lead in The Garden Party, but I could certainly play one or another of the bureaucrats (or several of them, I suppose). I’d like a chance at Largo Desolato, sure. His stuff is sort of absurdist moral comedy, as it might be Pythonesque and Beckettish, a bit Stoppardy à la N.F. Simpson in Caryl Churchill mode, in a sense, with a touch of Ionesco. But nothing like any of those. He’s really masterly at repetition, and really masterly at repetition as well. Extraordinary works. Extraordinary.

And of course an extraordinary life. Michael Zantovsky (the author of Havel: A Life) was Mr. Havel’s press secretary in his first term as President of Czechoslovakia, or possibly his first term as Czech President, or perhaps both. The details weren’t clear. For a politician and diplomat, though, he does an excellent job of situating the theater stuff, both interpreting the works themselves and situating them within Prague culture of the time. He’s better at describing the reactions to The Garden Party than the production, but that itself is fascinating. Really, though, Mr. Zantovsky (or Žantovský), is much better at the political maneuvering and chaos that immediately followed the Velvet Revolution. The stuff he was there for. The image of President Havel and President Walesa trying to find somewhere in the White House to have a cigarette was lovely.

My favorite bit could have come out of a Havel play: after Mr. Havel took office, he prioritized a sort of de-communization of the Castle, the immense thousand-year seat of government. I had no real idea about the Castle; you could fit ten White Houses in it with room to walk around between them. Good King Wenceslas ruled there; so did Hitler. Anyway, the thing about the Velvet Revolution is that the government never really stopped in between; the whole point of the velvet-ness was a combination of amnesty and continuity that meant that (among other things) people who had jobs in the Castle under the Communists in November 1989 would show up to work in December 1989 under democratic rule. And the Communist bureaucracy was of course famous for not letting the right hand know what the left was doing (while simultaneously encouraging either hand to inform on the other) so it took a while to, f’r’ex, figure out that the catering staff reported to the security staff.

Anyway, Now-President Havel prioritizes de-Communizing the Castle. He’s a believer, of course, in symbols and whatnot, and art and architecture and so forth, and he wants to make the Castle feel less communist. So evidently he would go on these excursions, room to room, trailing his inner circle of staff, trying to find out what was going on in this part of the Castle, and what was going on here, where people were being made to stand in line under huge statues, or whatever. He got into details of design, which drove everyone crazy. Anyway, in this insanely large complex, he’s trying to poke his nose everywhere, but not systematically, just charging around. And Mr. Zantovsky doesn’t say how long he’s been at it, alas, when he comes across a room full of women wearing headphones and typing. They were listening in on all the telephone conversations in the Castle. That had been their job under the Communists, and they were still showing up to work and doing it, even though nobody was coming and picking up the reports any more.

Such a great scene. And profoundly Havel-ian, too, although I suppose if he had written it, there would have had to be another scene later, where the President comes back in and the women are still there, still typing their reports for nobody to ever receive, only now of course in the newly liberated capital, with democracy and freedom, they have no headphones and no longer eavesdrop on people’s calls. They just skip that step, too, and keep filling out the reports just as they always did.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: Q is for Quindlen

Yeah, well, there aren't that many Qs.  And I'd at least heard of Anna Quindlen.  I'm pretty sure I've read an essay or two here and there.  So I picked up a book, complete with Oprah's Book Club sticker, on the theory that I might be ok.

Black and Blue is not a book I would normally read.  The black and blue of the title are the bruises of Frannie Benedetto, given to her by her abusive policeman husband.  She leaves him, through a network of helpers, and takes their son.  In the year that follows, we see her go from her immediate traumas to more groundedness; what makes this alive is the way Quindlen writes the character.  We see her triggered with love, loathing, fear, reconciliation--in the complicated ways that people interact, that make an abusive relationship stand not just as a weak-woman with an aggressive man.  We see the ways in which this relationship was a dance, back and forth; we see this even when she's away from Bobby Benedetto.  The book hinges on the custody issues that often arise in these cases--where the battered spouse may take the child but doesn't necessarily have legal rights to the child, where the abusive spouse may steal the child back.  Black and Blue are clearly also emotions--anger and sadness color the whole book.

It is a testament to the strength of Quindlen's writing that I finished this book.  I almost put it down after the first chapter, especially as the character and I share first names...creepy.  Quindlen is a compelling writer of character.  Can I recommend it? not really.  I do think it is a long ramble for a book--that it could have been paired down some.  I think too that its point is clear in a shorter format; I don't think we would have loved Fran less if we'd seen her beaten less, or understood her and her child's adjustment needs and coping less.  I'm not sure that I don't also understand the issues of domestic abuse better now than I would have in 1998 when the book was written; I think we've done a lot in almost 20 years to bring the issue out of the shadows.  But perhaps, in 1998, we needed this book.

(I still may try one of the other Qs I picked up)

Ed: E is for Easton

Obviously, I picked up Boys Don’t Knit, by T.S. Easton, because I am a boy who knits. Done.

It turns out that it’s quite a good book. Funny, silly, rude, sweet, outrageous. I’ll keep an eye out for the second one in the series.

I’m a little curious about the editing for the American edition—this is a very very English book, and it’s jarring when he talks about his father offering to take him to a soccer game. Does Macmillan US really think that American teens would be confused by references to football? Are they right? There were a couple of other places where there were what felt like Americanisms stuck in between the Tesco and the tea cozy, if you know what I mean. On the other hand, I’m told that British English now has Americanisms stuck in like that particularly amongst teens (such as this book’s first-person narrator) so perhaps a British reader of the American edition would find it totally smooth. Dunno, it seemed off to me. Although the choice not to change lollipop lady to the American crossing guard also confused me, so what do I know.

This also connected to a mini-gripe about the knitting talk—mostly it was marvelous, with our main character a kind of savant who has to visualize the whole pattern in his head before he begins, and then knits with machine-like precision. Not my way, but I loved reading it; the knitting was an extension of his character. I’m not convinced by the pattern for the easy-knit huge-stitch hoodie, I must admit, but hey, there’s a lot of stuff on ravelry I’m not convinced by, with pictures and everything, and that’s presumably real. As an idea for a pattern by a teenaged asbo who discovers a gift for the knitting needles, it works. No, my gripe is that in discussing a completed (or nearly-completed) knitted item, he several times says that there were no dropped stitches at all, and I think once says that an item knitted quickly was good, even though there were a few dropped stitches. I don’t know if a dropped stitch is something different in American Knitting than in British, but in my experience, a dropped stitch is a significant calamity which is likely to leave a large unsightly hole in the finished product. A twisted stitch is more the sort of thing I think a good knitter in a hurry might do, uneven cabling, or there’s probably a name for it when your stranded colorwork has the wrong tension and puckers the fabric, right? Anyway, dropped stitch clanged on my American ears quite badly.

But those are minor gripes in what was otherwise a fun YA sort of read.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: I is for Ivey

I freely confess to trolling the library shelves for a book that strikes my fancy by an author whose last name begins with a letter I don't yet have.  That's why I left the library this week with an I and a couple of Qs (yet to begin).  I also admit that I picked up this book because of the author's first name.

Eowyn Ivey's book, The Snow Child, (with excerpt link!) is perhaps best described as magical realism.  Using the core of a Russian fairy tale about a childless couple's snow sculpture comes to life, the book is set in Alaska of the early 20th century with childless homesteaders, Jack and Mabel.  Faina, a blond waif, appears out of the woods just after Jack and Mabel break their sadness and the stress of Alaskan life by making a snow maiden.  We are left wondering whether Faina is a snow child out of a fairy tale or an orphaned girl making her own way in the wilderness; really, this is a book about how we need to believe stories, how they bring a magic and a vibrancy to our lives, and how we rely on them to tell ourselves things about ourselves.

Ivey's book is very rich--the relationships between characters (Jack and Mabel, Mabel and Esther--another, more established homesteader, Jack and Garrett--Esther's son) are nuanced and deep.  The setting is interesting, in a way that appealed to the Little House on the Prairie reader in me.  I was sometimes disappointed by the way Faina interacts with figures and I blame this on Ivey wanting to have her Snow Maiden and her real girl simultaneously; Ivey doesn't want to settle one way or the other which leaves the magic sometimes flatter than it might be.  The end has a complicated twist I wasn't expecting, which pushed the book back towards magical realism.  A good read--sad, still, sweet, strong.

Ed: N is for Novik

I like Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels a bunch. Not that they’re perfect, but they are enjoyable—they play to her strengths, and her strengths happen to coincide nicely with my Sources of Reader Pleasure. On the other hand, I have been feeling that the Temeraire story is getting played-out; I don’t look forward to the new books the way I might. I was somewhat ambivalent about the new non-Temeraire novel, then, mostly eager, but a little concerned that Ms. Novik would abandon the plot-driven incident-packed style that I like so much.

Well, Uprooted is certainly packed with incident.

It is also powerfully evocative, and the world of Fantasy Early Modern Poland is a magnificent creation. The magic, as well, is lovely, and the core of the book is in Our Hero, a young woman with a talent for magic, as apprentice to an older (but dead sexy) man whose talent for magic appears at first to be utterly incompatible with hers… yes, you can certainly tell where this is going. But while it does have some of the tropes of Romance that get up my nose, it manages to avoid other ones that get even further up my nose, so that’s all right, d’y’see? And while I don’t know that I think the characters, as such, are brilliant inventions, the relationships between the characters are compellingly drawn, and drawn in such a way as to propel the plot, and that’s most certainly all right.

I’m wondering, though, whether the inclusion of a scene earlyish in the book where a Bad Guy attempts to rape Our Hero is the sort of thing that the article I can’t seem to find now was on about—I mean an article I can’t seem to find now, that says more or less if you are including a rape scene just to show that the villain is a Bad Guy, please don’t. But there have been lots of notes recently about the inclusion (or not) of rape scenes in movies, books, TV and comics; the question really ought to be in people’s minds. And while this scene is handled quite well, it really isn’t necessary from a plot point of view, and is of questionable value from a character point of view—that is to say, nothing of the decisions she later makes seems informed specifically by her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. Of course, there are lots of things in books that aren’t necessary, and perhaps sexual violence does not, in fact, constitute a special category such that an author must justify its presence by necessity. I am inclined to think it does, by virtue of the history of the trope, but your mileage is likely to vary. I’m not angry at Ms. Novik for including the scene, I’m just a trifle uncomfortable with it in the otherwise terrific book.

Digression: I am, however, really angry with Google right now. In an attempt to discover whether other people had been musing on this question, I typed [novik uprooted rape scene] as my initial search, without quotes, and Google seems to feel that rape and sex are synonymous. In addition to making YHB angry, they boost to the top of the search discussions of an entirely different scene, consensual in nature, effectively obscuring any articles that I’m actually looking for. But mostly, that’s just bad and wrong, Google. Boo. End Digression.

Anyway… Uprooted is a terrific book, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. One of those when-can-I-get-back-to-my-book reads. On several occasions I responded aloud to an event in the book; a couple of times with an ewwww but at least once with a yesss!

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: J is for Jacobs

If we judge books by their covers, I might never have picked up Kate Jacobs' Comfort Food.  (Although TSOR reveals that it is just the cover on my library's edition and not the cover on her site which more accurately reveals the tone of the book).  My edition is black with some artfully scattered peaches, some split and open, others closed.  But the peaches aren't photographs with dripping juice but artfully painted in a Chardin sort of way--pretty but not gooey.  And the book is more of a gooey-peach sort of thing: sweet, soft, sticky, bruised.

Set in the cooking show world with our heroine Gus, her daughters, cohost, neighbor, various beaux, tv figures, etc., this is a book in the "chick lit" genre.  Women discover their feelings, have vibrant lives (or change their lives to be more vibrant), cook, fall in love.  It is amusing as it riffs off of what can go wrong in the kitchen (especially as folks try to make things go perfectly).

But this book is closer to Jennifer Crusie in style (though less explicit in the sex which Crusie writes with anticipation and tension and steam and here is dealt with behind suggestion and closed doors, MYOB) than some artfully displayed peaches suggested.  I may go back and look for some of the books in her other series, The Friday Night Knitting Club, though I vastly prefer cooking to knitting.

Ed: R is for Rubin

Fran and I and a friend of ours recently went to see Edward Petherbridge in My Perfect Mind, and in the build-up and excitement, the friend lent me The Nicholas Nickleby Story: The Making Of The Historic Royal Shakespeare Company Production by Leon Rubin. It’s a terrific book, and does a great job of illustrating just how crazy the RSC was to do the thing in 1980, and how unlikely it was to succeed, and how really really unlikely it was to solve their funding problems for years. Mr. Rubin was the assistant director, assistant to the two co-directors (not exactly co-equal, tho’, as one of the co-s was Trevor Nunn who was at the time Artistic Director of the RSC, so there’s certainly a sense in which Mr. Rubin was assistant to the assistant) and had insight into the process from both an artistic and an administrative angle. I’d recommend it as a balance to a really good production diary written by one of the actors, only there isn’t one. Alas.

This lack is particularly keen because few of the actors come across as vibrant characters in this story—to be honest, Mr. Rubin doesn’t really write vibrant characters and is better at describing problems and solutions. Still, you get a sense of David Edgar, the playwright, and the co-directors, Mr. Nunn and John Caird, and the composer Stephen Oliver, and the set designer, more than you do the actors. Roger Rees does become a character, and you get a sense of him as the lead actor in more than one sense, pushing the production toward his view as well as acting out the others’. Mr Petherbridge has a couple of good scenes in the book, as does Bob Peck, but John Woodvine barely appears at all, and while he is effusive about Ben Kingsley’s Squeers, there’s no depiction of Mr. Kingsley’s process of creating the character.
Digression: I know that the broadcast version is not the original cast, nor yet the second cast, but I find I cannot keep in my head the idea that Alun Armstrong was not the first Squeers. I certainly cannot imagine Ben Kingsley in the role. I would be fascinated to know how Mr. Armstrong approached the role, joining the cast after the long development was over. Someone should really be doing some sort of oral history of the show now, before anyone else dies. Anyway, this book doesn’t present a Ben Kingsley to usurp Mr. Armstrong in my mind, so I’m sure I will continue to forget that he played the part. End description.

The bulk of the book, of course, depicts the months-long period of research and improvisation that forty-odd actors went through with three directors and a playwright and the novel. I would have hated that process. Oh, Lord, would I have hated it. As did some of the cast, evidently, although most of them stuck it out. For which I am grateful, if not really understanding.

Now, during much of that period, the actors were also performing Shakespeare in repertory. That is, depending on the show and the part, they were putting in full days preparing NickNick and then playing George Page in Merry Wives of Windsor in the evening, and then coming back the next day to work on NickNick all day and play Iago at night. These are roles Bob Peck actually played in Newcastle in the last weeks before NickNick premiered, while he was learning Sir Mulberry Hawk and Big John Yorkshireman—more accurately he was rehearsing the NickNick roles whilst David Edgar was simultaneously writing them. John McEnery whilst preparing to play Mr. Mantalini, among others, was playing Pistol and Roderigo. Mr. Rubin doesn’t give a sense of what that was like at all, but then, he was spending those nights in meetings with Mr. Caird and Mr. Nunn and Mr. Edgar, amongst others. Probably just as exhausting.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Ed: P is for Perry

I’m interested in Grayson Perry as a sort of public figure—I can’t say I much like the art that I’ve seen pictures of, I’m afraid, although of course with pots and tapestries it’s unlikely the pictures on the internet do the artworks justice. But the person, or at least the public persona, I find fascinating. He’s wildly transgressive in a comforting, middle-brow way; he’s a straight man who likes wearing dresses, particularly outrageous ones; he pontificates about art while mocking the way art seems to draw people into pontificating. He’s an unpopular pop artist. He combines being an avant-garde artist with being a television personality. It’s as if Robert Mapplethorpe combined with Graham Norton, or as if Salvador Dali.

The cartoon on the cover of Playing to the Gallery, Helping Contemporary Art in Its Struggle to Be Understood, has the title scrawled in spray paint over a Rothko. I like contemporary art, but I have never really enjoyed Rothko’s stuff, so that was an added spark of interest—tho’ I don’t think, in that specific case, that Rothko’s paintings need help to be understood, but maybe they do. And while I like contemporary art, not everybody does; perhaps, I thought, this book will help me in my struggle to be understood as genuinely liking Clyfford Still’s stuff or Sol Lewitt’s. At any rate, I grabbed it off the library shelf and gave it a try.

It’s entertaining, often cleverly written, largely unhelpful, inconsistent, somewhat incoherent and a lot of fun. I don’t think it will help contemporary art in its struggle to be understood—if you don’t like the stuff, at best you will feel better about not liking it. Or at least feel less like the stuff is an insult directed at you personally, which seems to be a common reaction… it’s much more likely to be an insult directed at previous generations of artists. And recent ones, too, which means that the insulted stuff is also contemporary art, within the meaning of the act, and you won’t have liked that, either.

As a working artist, concerned for his income with gallery shows and critics, museums and crowds, Mr. Perry has some interesting insights into the industry. He also is aware that, for instance, a hundred years have passed since Marcel Duchamp put his Fountain on show. His art-school teachers’ art-school teachers would have been too young for art school when that happened. I’ve read far too much pontification about contemporary art that fails to understand that there has been time for reactions to reactions to reactions to that provocation. It’s still a marvelous joke, but it’s a marvelous old joke, and has been for a good long while now.

Anyway, the book is unsatisfying and provoking, and good, too. If you would rather, you can listen to the Reith Lectures from which the book was adapted. The Q&A part is pretty good, I have to say.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Post Script: Oops, already had a P. Ah, well.

Max: M is for Mass

I already have an M but you should know about Wendy Mass's book, Pi in the Sky.

In this book, the seventh son of the supreme overlord of the universe (Joseph),delivers pies. that`s right. he. delivers. pies. But when the solar system is taken out of the space/time continuum, he is the only one who can save it. But he`s still grieving over the removal of his best friend. With the help of a grandmother (who gives pies to deliver to him) , a (slightly weird) girl named Annika Klutzman, and the voice of Kal, his best friend.



I like this book because it has a very cool problem in it. I don`t like this book because... well, I don`t really have a complaint about the book.


I would like to recommend fans of science fiction.

Fran: An Additional W, for Woodman

I forgot I HAD a W so I read Betsy Woodman's Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes, book 1 in a series.

Not really blogging it but to say that it was a fine read of a Scottish woman in India in the years after WWII and Indian Independence, her fortune telling parrot--Mr. Ganguly, and the town's various Muslim/Sikh/Christian/Hindu characters.

I'll probably look at the next in the series...

Fran: A is for Arnett

Mindee Arnett, The Nightmare Affair.

It came from the Teen Room.

Magic and mystery, there's a creative set up where (rare) dream pairs can see into the minds to see the past, present, and sometimes the future.  These skills are used to try to stop murders associated with someone trying to improperly use magic to control more of the world.

More pent-up tension and angst than a late Harry Potter book. 
You have been warned.

Fran: Y is for Yezierska

I recently searched the library shelves for new alphabet authors, especially for some of the more obscure letters.  My "Y" is Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers.

This is a novel written in 1925, which made me interested to see what was happening there; I confess that I had never heard of her, though the forward by Alice Kessler-Harris assured me that the book had been well received at the time. TSOR reveals that it is a popular book club or high school read.

Set in the shtetl of Hester Street in New York, following an immigrant family who'd come to America, it is a little slice of traditions and expectations set against the shock of modernism and desires.  The Smolinsky family is 4 girls--Sara (our main character), Fania, Bessie, and Mashah--their mother and father.  Bread Givers are the men in the lives of the daughters, beginning with their father who demands utmost respect from his daughters ("No girl can live without a father or a husband to look out for her...It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence") and from the neighborhood ("What? I work like a common thickneck? My learning comes before my living.  I'm a man of brains.  In a necessity I could turn to business." Turns out he has no head for business and is cheated in a deal when he buys a grocery).  The girls work, giving their father part of their wages to keep him from having to work.  As they fall in love, he ridicules and drives away their partners but the necessity of marrying off daughters leads him to make poor choices that the girls must live with.  The beaux are all men of the New World--Berel is a shop clerk with aspirations of his own business but Reb Smolinsky drives him away and marries Bessie off to the widower fishmonger who needs a new wife to care for his 5 children; Jacob is a concert pianist son of a wealthy merchant but both fathers part them and she marries a man who sells jewelry but pretends to be a diamond dealer and a con artist.  Fania falls in love with a writer but is married off to a rich man who doesn't love her and uses her as a walking status symbol.

Against this Sara desires to make something of herself.  She is our feminist.  She studies at night school, even though learning is not for girls.  She works in the garment trades as an ironer and scrimps and saves (against a system that values men's work more than women's) to go to college and become a teacher.  She works through college and fights against class prejudice and the difficulties of her upbringing.  She begins teaching and finds love for herself.  And as her mother passes away and her father remarries to a woman who only wants his insurance payout, Sara reaches a detente with her father and takes him in with her.  The idea being that she sees his weakness and takes him back out of her own mercy not out of his demands (or even his merit).  It's hard not to see this as turning her from a free woman into a proper woman but it's also easy to forgive that for it's time (and perhaps the desire to hope that when we are old and foolish, our children will forgive us).

It's a really compelling read--full of Socialism and feminism and American immigrant history.  Glad I found a good "Y".

Fran: L is NOT for Lee, L is for Lelord

I tried.  I read almost 30 pages of Ashton Lee's The Reading Circle.  In Ashton's defense, maybe the first book was better.  Maybe I needed to care about these characters before I began this one.  In my defense, perhaps the publisher/cover designer should have more prominently displayed the fact that it was a second book in a series.  Probably a flaw that this I found the second book's openings so bland that I could not be bothered to finish it or seek out the first book.

Instead, at the same time, perhaps in uncanny premonition of its dullitude, I picked up Francois Lelond's Hector and the Search for Happiness.  I vaguely remembered it had been made into a movie with Simon Pegg (whose films have amused me).  If I had remembered that while at the library, if I had had access to the web and its reviews, I might have also passed on the book.

Hector is a psychiatrist from a nameless city somewhere in the Western world who decides to travel the world and look for the secret of what makes people happy.  The book is a series of small vignettes told in broad generalizations; the idea is that this is a children's style book for adults.  The characters are flat and generic--deliberately so, to make us feel that they are universal.  The situations reveal Hector as privileged, white, wealthy enough, shallowly male.  Women are primarily paid attention to for their beauty; Hector is constantly remarking on it and how he's had more than his share of attractive women.  His guilt over being complicit in the Asian sex trade is patronizing and shallow--I must actually love her to have slept with her; I will wind up my world tour by using my business connections to take her from this life of selling her body for money.  His Western admiration for the mystic wisdom of an ancient Chinese monk continues to stick in my craw as I relive the book in this review.  The list of "revelations" are fine for what they are but seem quite like thinly veiled psychological claptrap.

My search for happiness reached fulfillment with the eventual end of this book.  I do not need to read the sequel of Hector and the Search for Love.

(I may continue to read "L" authors in the search for something good.)

Ed: C is for Cleese

So… Anyway… I read the John Cleese book.

He's a funny man. No, really. He's still funny. It's a funny book.

Unfortunately, it's not an entirely funny book, and there are sizable chunks of the first half that are more or less of the form:

I remember I couldn't have been more than six or twelve when an entirely ordinary thing happened at the end of the school day. Much later, I told my therapist about it, and I still remember how the feelings came back to me, just as they had when I was nine, a feeling of overpowering ordinariness. Indeed, writing this, I can remember it now, even though things are very different, and different people annoy me in different ways. But at the time, it was like it was at the time. And so was my father, who was like that.

Except that he'll throw some bizarre oddity in the next paragraph to make Fran ask what I was sniggerin' at. So that's all right.

The second half of the book covers his career in comedy up through the formation of the Pythons—well, it was clearly intended to stop with the formation of the Pythons, but he clearly wound up writing another chapter after that, which included enough discussion of the Python working methods that it took away from the structure of the thing, although of course I didn't mind—as I age, I find I am becoming more interested in reading about them and their work than watching episodes of the Flying Circus for the n=kth time. The evolution of individual sketches, or even of ideas of what works in a sketch, from his Cambridge Circus days through writing for David Frost and the two Ronnies, to sketches I know by heart.

Speaking of which, the bookshop sketch on Contractual Obligation was written for At Last the 1948 Show and has been done various times with various people; Wikipedia claims that Bob Hope performed it at one point, tho' I have not confirmed that fact.

It occurred to me, as I was reading the book, that many of my favorite Python bits, in particular many of the great Cleese bits, are essentially extended world's worsts. If you aren't familiar with world's worst, it's a one-liner improv game where the emcee throws out a prompt of the world's worst something, and the players come up with examples. Whether they started from that germ or not, there are sketches about the world's worst game show, the world's worst mountaineer, the world's worst Hungarian phrasebook, the world's worst food shop, the world's worst arts interviewer, the world's worst pet shop, etc, etc. The thing that makes them great, though, is the other guy in the sketch, who responds to the world's worst bookshop customer in some insane and hilarious way. That's the funny stuff.

Thanks,
-Ed.

Fran: K is for Kaufmann

Nicholas Kaufmann, Dying is My Business, was entertaining.

In the vein of authors like Jim Butcher, Kaufmann has mixed an urban (New York City) punk mafia-style set-up (our hero, Trent, is a henchman, a "collector" for a boss named Underwood) with vampire/werewolf/dragon/gargoyle magic world fiction.  The main character is interesting from the start since he cannot die--he is killed and then revives--and his lack of memory/context makes him ideal as a stand-in for us when we need things explained to us.  In this respect, it is very noir--this seamy crime underbelly that exists to the world that most of us never see ALSO has a seamy magic underbelly. There are well-fleshed out magical companions that become part of a team foiling the evil mages trying to harness destructive magic and un-make NYC (humanity and the world, etc. etc.).  It is an excellent thriller, with ripping, fast-paced action and well-written set pieces.  It wraps up at the end (for our satisfaction) but leaves open space for his sequel, Die and Stay Dead; I enjoyed the writing and plotting enough that I will actively seek this out.

(One very minor and very personal complaint--when the oracle reveals the cryptic location that our heroes need to find a piece of the puzzle before the bad guys do, I immediately knew where it was.  But specialized medievalist knowledge shouldn't ruin this plot point for most of you.  And for those of you who immediately know, the secret is worked out by Trent and his companions about 5 pages later so it isn't like we wander around the elephant in the room for very long.)

Fran: N is for Notaro

I recently finished Laurie Notaro's book, there's a (slight) chance i might be going to hell. Subtitled "a novel of sewer pipes, pageant queens, and big trouble", it's a comic novel in the vein of Jane Smiley's Moo (which I have read and enjoyed) and Jill Conner Browne's Sweet Potato Queens books (which I have only glanced at but have often picked up and set down in that maybe kind of way).  Very chick-lit in a Christopher Moore way.

The main character, Maye, follows her husband from Phoenix to his new job at a small liberal arts college in Washington state.  There she looks for friendship of fun friends to cure her loneliness.  But the tight-knit town, with its various demographic groups (old-time seniors who've lived in the tiny town forever, hippie new agers, college faculty), doesn't seem to have a space for her.  Hence the desire to run for Sewer Pipe Queen, in a desperate attempt to bust into the small-town scene.  The secrets of the town, stemming from arsons years before that destroyed the pipe plant, come out in the process and change the nature of the town (and Maye), such that they can have a place for each other.

While others loved this book, I was charmed only enough to keep reading.  The scenes are over-the-top scenarios constructed to be outrageous.  There are many flat characters, used for comic scenarios but without depth; Notaro wants us to believe in Maye's depth (and the depth of the former Sewer Pipe Queen, Ruby) but she constantly brings us into situations that are funny but not transformative/revelatory.  The writing often forces us to find it funny: "Crawford Lake Road was not paved, and not only was it a bumpy dirt road, it was full of potholes that looked more like spots where meteors had bounced off the face of the earth the way a basketball inevitably rebounds off the head of the fat girl in freshman gym class."

I could see picking up another but I suspect that I would be thinking of the annoying bits more than the bits I enjoyed.  I might pick up a non-fiction from her journalism days--I suspect that the writing would be more subtle and better shaped.

Max: H is for Hale

I read Big Bad Ironclad by Nathan Hale (the writer, not the spy). In this book E. Pluribus Hangman and the British Provost of the revolutionary war are back to hear one of Nathan Hale's new stories (last book Nathan Hale (the spy, not the writer) said his last words: I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. And then Nathan Hale got eaten by a history book! When he came out he knew all about our history!). In this book Nathan Hale tells them about the civil war! (He told them about the naval part of the war, okay?) Anyway, he told them about how the Norfolk shipyard was taken, how they burnt and sunk the Merrimack,how the south made the world's first ironclad,how John Ericsson built the Monitor,the part where the two ironclads fought and about Will Cushing and his encounter with the Albermale, and much, much, more!

I like this book because it is funny,and it has a cool prank at the end.

I do not like this book because it has a really scary part in the middle.

I would recommend this book to people who like the civil war and other big wars. I would also recommend this book to people who have read hazardous tales books because those people will get the jokes in this book.

Where things stand as of 5/18/15

Letter

Max

Brynnen

Fran

Ed

Author (Last, First)

Title

Author (Last, First)

Title

Author (Last, First)

Title

Author (Last, First)

Title

A

Adams, Douglas

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Aaronovich, Ben

Midnight Riot

B

Bacigalupi, Paolo

The Doubt Factory

C

Carlson, Caroline

VNHLP II: Terror of the Southlands

Cato, Beth

Clockwork Dagger

D

De Los Santos

Love Walked In

E

Egan, Tim

Dodsworth in Paris

F

Flanagan, John

Siege of Macindaw

G

Grabenstein, Chris

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

Grossman, Lev

The Magicians

H

Hale, Shannon

Forgotten Sisters

I

J

K

Kingfisher, T

Seven Brides

L

M

McDonald, Megan

Judy Moody Goes to College

Martinez, A. Lee

Helen and Troy's Epic Road Trip

Morrow, James

Galapagos Regained

N

O

Oliver, Lauren

Liesl and Po

P

Pastis, Stephan

Timmy Failure

Pakenham, Thomas

Remarkable Trees of the World

Pratchett, Terry

Rising Steam

Q

R

Reeve, Philip

Goblins

S

Scalzi, John

Lock-In

Scalzi, John

Lock-In

T

Tolkein, JRR

The Hobbit

U

V

Vernon, Ursula

Danny Dragonbreath: Knight-napped

Vernon, Ursula

Castle Hangnail

W

Ward, Matthew

The Fantastic Family Whipple

X

Y

Z