Mister Monkey

Posted on February 12, 2017 by

mister-monkeyMister Monkey is a terrible musical based on an inexplicably beloved children’s book. And the production at the center of this novel by Francine Prose is particularly bad. But the cast and crew try:

They are in this together, everyone is happy to be here and disappointed to be here, glad to have a part in a play, glad to work for scale, but truthfully not all that overjoyed to be working in an off-off-off-off Broadway production of Mister Monkey, the umpteen-hundredth revival of the cheesy but mysteriously durable music based on the classic children’s novel.

Prose’s novel reads like a collection of linked stories, with each chapter following a different person, sometimes an actor in the play, sometimes a member of the audience, sometimes just someone connected to one of the people connected to the play. The thread winds through the city, returning again and again to the play.

I liked this structure. I could never tell just where it would go next, and it brought home the idea that every single person has a story invisible to everyone else. The man whose grandson spoke up loudly during a moment of quiet during the show is dealing with old age and the feeling of being left out as life rolls on. The grandson is fretting over the change in status that comes with a new school. (The grandson is said to be precocious, but he seemed excessively so to me.) His teacher is worrying over her inability to control her classroom in the way her principal and parents desire, especially when it means giving up teachable moments and ignoring student questions. And so on.

Not all of the chapters are as enjoyable as the others, but the nice thing is that if a particular character’s story bored me, another came along quickly. And often a new story would allow me to see a previous one in a new light. The book is at its weakest when the characters get philosophical and spiritual. There’s a whole section about the Monkey God that seemed over-the-top to me, but that could be my lack of familiarity with Hinduism. Then again, knowledge of Hinduism could have made it worse. The book is at its best when it uncovers characters—their hidden motivations and dreams behind the actions that don’t necessarily make sense.

This is, I believe, one of two monkey-oriented books in the Tournament of Books this year. I preferred the other one, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, but this one has its charms. It will come up against one of the three sports-related books from the play-in round. I started, but gave up on two of those three books. (Sudden Death was too all over the place to hold my interest at the time and The Throwback Special bored me.) So, at this point, I’m rooting for this one to win its round. And if Charlie Freeman defeats the The Nix (which I also haven’t read), the two monkey books will go head-to-head in round 2.

Posted in Contemporary, Fiction | 2 Comments

Black Wave

Posted on February 11, 2017 by

black_waveThe first half of Black Wave by Michelle Tea is boring—very well-written, but tedious. The main character, Michelle, spends most of it drinking and doing drugs and hooking up with different women in late 90s San Francisco. She’s drifting along, sort of functional, but not doing particularly well. She’s able to get herself to her bookstore job, which she managed to snag in part because she’s published a moderately successful memoir, but she hasn’t managed to write anything else.

I think the tedium is intentional on Tea’s part, although I also think that readers who know the scene in which the book takes place will find much to enjoy in the details Tea includes. It’s good writing, and it’s often very funny. Take, for example, this description of the apartment Michelle shares with friends in a house once renowned as “a magic castle of queerness with a serious outlaw history”:

Clovis the Landlord had promised he would not raise the rent and he had no intention of selling the house. The man spent his lonely nights singing into his personal karaoke machine in the flat downstairs. The sound of him singing Sammy Davis Jr., his warbling voice floating up through the floorboards, broke everyone’s heart. Everyone in the punk house loved their landlord. It was okay that the shower, a metal closet, was rusting through the bottom, surely harboring gangrene and soaking the house in soggy rot—Clovis’s second-floor apartment was in no better shape. If he had the money he’d fix their shower, but to get the money he would have to raise their rent, and so they put a milk crate in the shower to stand above the jagged rust and wore flip-flops while they bathed, just in case.

Even though Michelle is obviously living in terrible circumstances, there’s not a real sense of danger. The whole scene is hazed over, whether with nostalgia or drugs isn’t clear. Yet, as evocative as the writing is, it’s not something I could sustain interest in for 300 pages. It’s a good thing, then, that the novel takes a turn just after 100 pages, when Michelle decides to move to Los Angeles. And what a turn it takes!

When we see Michelle in Los Angeles, we learn that a lot of what we’ve just read isn’t exactly true. The characters aren’t exactly who they seemed, and Michelle has adjusted her narrative to protect others’ privacy. But they still have demands—”If you’re going to write about me at least give me good hair,” says her girlfriend, Quinn. To which Michelle thinks, “I Won’t Write About My Life Because No One Wants To Be In My Story.”

Okay, so we’re going to have a narrative about narrative—how memoir arrives at truth and all that. And this, too, is skillfully done. There’s a hilarious bit where Michelle thinks about how to characterize herself and decides to make herself a man in her book:

Maybe Michelle could actually keep the ideas that obsessed her—injustice, struggle, gender, feminism—but put them onto a man, thereby making them universal! Women have been trying to make feminism universal forever but had anyone ever thought of this? She would be such a hero! Michelle felt all fired up but it was probably just coffee. She felt herself sag as the caffeine peaked in her bloodstream and began its retreat.

But the book isn’t done with turning itself into something different. It’s only after this new thread has been established that the black wave of the title arrives. Some sort of ecological disaster, in the form of a wave that will engulf the West Coast is coming. Not right away, but soon. And there’s no stopping it. So life changes, not entirely for the worse either. There’s chaos and crime and loss of infrastructure that we rely on. It’s mostly terrible. Some people commit suicide to escape. But there are always people who keep going, and some of them, like Michelle, are able to eke out a slightly better life for the time they have left. There’s a whole thing about strangers connecting with each other through dreams and them finding each other in life. Life is strange and almost unrecognizable and certain to end soon, but there is life while it lasts.

I don’t want to make the book’s final chapters seem trite and saccharine. It’s too weird and darkly perverse for that. Maybe I was just won over because Michelle spends her last days in a used bookstore making out with Matt Dillon. (Not my type, but still.) But I also liked the idea that life can keep pressing forward, right up until the end. Maybe it doesn’t feel like much of a life, but it is life. It is persistent.

Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction | 3 Comments

Sweet Lamb of Heaven

Posted on February 6, 2017 by

sweet-lamb-of-heavenWhen Anna’s daughter, Lena, was born, Anna started hearing voices. They weren’t telling her anything in particular or even necessarily speaking to her. It was just ambient noise that no one else seemed to be able to hear. And when Lena started talking, the voices stopped.

Six years later, the voices long since gone, Anna is on the run. Her husband, Ned, has become increasingly distant, cold, and unfaithful, and Anna has realized she can no longer live with him. She’s convinced that he won’t accept a divorce because it would mean losing the money she brought to the marriage. He had no actual interest Anna or for Lena. Until now, anyway. After Anna left, Ned decided to run for office in their home state of Alaska, and he needs his loyal wife and adorable daughter at his side for photo ops.

Anna wants nothing to do with Ned or his plans, so she’s made her way to Maine and found a run-down motel that has fully charmed Lena. It’s the off-season, so the motel is quiet. Only gradually does it collect an eclectic group of guests who all form a sort of ad hoc community, looking after Lena and befriending Anna. It’s all a little strange, but Anna prefers this life to anything Ned would give her, and she’s determined to stay hidden from him.

Of course, she can’t stay hidden forever.

This novel by Lydia Millet is a little bit domestic drama, a little bit psychological suspense, and a little bit supernatural horror. These are all genres I’m inclined to enjoy when done well, and I enjoyed this book. I didn’t love it, though. I think I wanted it to get grittier—to commit more fully to the horror of the situation.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of horror. The relationship between Ned and Anna has plenty of horror, but it’s hard to see at first. We’re forced to take Anna’s word for it, and she may be delusional. Anna’s narration makes it clear that Ned doesn’t care about her, but her early fear of him that causes her to run away seems without reason. This is not an uncommon thing in life, and I was inclined to believe Anna about Ned’s dark side, but it was life experience that made me feel that way. There’s not much in the book to support Anna’s fear. Once Ned begins pursuing her, Anna’s feelings are justified by the narrative.

The early ambiguity could be a really effective set-up, but the book doesn’t really seem interested in questioning Anna’s reliability. It’s too bad, too, because had the reader been forced to question Anna’s version of events, Ned’s actions at the end of the book would be even more chilling. There’s a way in which gaslighting causes a person to question reality, and Ned, well, let’s just say he knows how to make his own reality. What if we readers had been allowed to be taken in by him, even if just for a moment?

The supernatural elements do come together at the end, and we’re given something of an explanation for the voices. It’s a bunch of mumbo jumbo about the language of the universe being God or some such thing. I’m not sure it entirely makes sense, and I don’t particularly care about all the details of it. I am interested in the tension between being alone and being together that she addresses. And there are some pleasing turns of phrase in Anna’s final musings on how the world works:

Maybe our gods are as small as we are or as large, varying with the size of our empathy. Maybe when a man’s mind is small his God shrinks to fit.

The thing is, even though I’m not entirely convinced that this book works, I’m interested in it. I think Millett is playing with genre by playing it down, keeping it subtle. It’s not entirely effective, but I like the idea of what she’s doing. And the book held my interest from beginning to end. I think it’ll make for some interesting discussion in the Tournament of Books.

Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction | 4 Comments

Version Control

Posted on February 3, 2017 by

version-controlI’ve started and set aside several books in the last couple of weeks in what was starting to seem like a futile quest for a really good story. I very nearly decided to give up my intention to read as many Tournament of Books contenders as possible and just turn someone I could count on the give me a good story. But then I picked up Version Control by Dexter Palmer and was caught up in it.

Rebecca Wright, the main character in the novel, is married to a scientist named Philip Steiner who is working on something called a causality violation device (not a time machine!). She drinks too much and is uneasy about what’s happening in the world around her. She’s grieving the death of her son, and her husband is buried in his work. And then… events ensue. (There’s a time machine causality violation device involved, so the nature of the events should be no surprise, although the details may be.)

The first half of the book is mostly uneventful. It’s a lot of set-up, but I enjoyed getting to know the characters and situation too much to be bothered. The world of the book is in our near future. Self-driving cars are the norm, the president can pop onto our screens to talk to us anytime he pleases (shudder), and kids are given customized lessons on tablets at school. It’s just different enough to feel futuristic, but not so different as to feel implausible. And Philip’s scientific work is as much about tedious trying and trying again as it is about making big discoveries. We get the story not just of Rebecca and Philip’s daily life but also the history of their courtship and eventual marriage. They’re an odd pair, but I found their story pretty sweet, even though I’m not sure I could deal with really being close to either of them.

Once the big events ensue, we see how different experiences change and don’t change who people essentially are. Rebecca still drinks a lot, her friend Kate still has a fractious romance with Philip’s colleague Carson, and the guards at the lab still muse over what time travel really is. Yet everything has changed.

The book is jam-packed with characters who like to talk about big ideas. Rebecca’s father, a Unitarian minister, has regular debates about God with Philip. Kate and Carson both muse to friends about whether Kate is secretly or subconsciously racist and therefore unable to live happily in her relationship with Carson, a black man. And Rebecca’s colleagues at Lovability, the online dating service, discuss to what extent their clients are people vs. bits of data. Some of this may come across as false to some readers, but to me, it felt realistic. Not everyone talks about this stuff openly, but some people do. And Palmer avoids turning these discussions into places where he can drum into readers his own ideas regarding these issues. They’re part of the fabric of the world and worth considering, for the characters and us as readers.

I’m still mulling over whether the actual resolution of the plot really works. Is the world the novel ends up with the right one? How can we know? What makes a world the right one? There’s also a lot of scientific talk about transfer of matter and causality that sounds good—good enough for me to shrug, accept, and keep reading. How realistic the science is doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that it’s a good story with some interesting ideas. On that front, it delivers.

Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction | 8 Comments

The Discoverers

Posted on January 26, 2017 by

the-discoverersThe Discoverers is the first in Daniel Boorstin’s “knowledge trilogy.” (The others are The Creators and The Seekers.) This book, more than 700 pages long in small type, describes the progress of the inventors and explorers of Western civilization, beginning with ancient Greece and Rome and continuing through the beginning of the 20th century. Boorstin writes about how inquisitive, persistent, brave, and intelligent people have continued to try to find out about the world around us, and about our own interesting selves, since history began.

Rather than do a simple chronological history, the book is divided into four sections: Time, The Earth and the Seas, Nature, and Society. Time addresses the history of clocks and the process of cutting up our days and years into pieces. (It never occurred to me that — duh — you’d need something other than a sundial at night, so people were making things like water clocks very early on.) Reliable calendars depended on knowing astronomy and geography and mathematics. A reliable clock, with a spring, made navigation possible. And then, of course, navigation opened up the whole world. Boorstin talks about the Mongol Empire and how they opened the way to the East for a few decades before the land curtain came down again; the way Christian dogma messed up mapmaking for centuries; the influence of the Vikings; and the discovery of new flora and fauna during the age of exploration.

This leads easily into the section on Nature. Boorstin explores the importance of experimental science — it wasn’t always the case that people used their senses to learn about the world around them. Slowly, personal observation and the nearly-miraculous invention of the microscope replaced the tyranny of Galen, a Greek physician whose dictates about the human body had been reigning since the third century CE. The Royal Society spread discoveries by letter and the Philosophical Transactions, and people started striving to be first to get credit for a new piece of knowledge (especially Newton, who sounds like a total pill.) We began to catalogue everything in Creation.

The section on Society is the most higgledy-piggledy (as perhaps you’d expect. Is Society more higgledy-piggledy than Nature? Discuss.) It begins with the art of Memory (one of the Muses!) which was largely lost when printing began. Then there’s a piece on the development of the discipline of history over time, and the discovery of prehistory, archaeology, and related sciences like paleography and sphragistics. (Ask me to tell you about sphragistics! I looked it up!) Finally, there’s a brief section on anthropology, demography and statistics, economics (Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes in about three pages), and the atom.

There are a lot of things to like about this book. It’s written in congenial prose, with lots of anecdotes about the people involved. I thoroughly enjoyed, for instance, reading about Captain James Cook, who was sent (among other things) to prove there was no antarctic continent. It was a surprise to me that as recently as the origins of the United States, we still didn’t know whether there was any land at the South Pole. Cook was perhaps the greatest negative discoverer. I also enjoyed reading about Linnaeus, who shocked the scientific community with his unabashed descriptions of the sexuality of plants. Prurient, indeed! The Discoverers has a tremendous amount to say about the excitement of explorers and inventors and how they initiated change.

There are a few things that disappointed me, though. The scope of this book is so broad — well over 5000 years of history — that Boorstin can only touch on Great Men, most of whom are so Great that I already knew about them. There were some exceptions, of course, but for the most part this is Columbus, Vespucci, Galileo, Copernicus, Prince Henry the Navigator, Leeuwenhoek, Linnaeus — not small figures with unexpected contributions. I appreciated the detail and the anecdotes, but I’d have liked to learn more.

Speaking of which, this book is over 700 pages long (did I mention?) and there is not one single woman in it. Not, that is to say, as an inventor, an explorer, a scientist, a mapmaker, an author, or a seeker after knowledge. No Hypatia. No Marie Curie. No Lise Meitner. No Ada Lovelace. No Emilie du Chatelet or Sofia Kovalevskaya or Maria Sibylla Merian. I suppose I should mention that there were a few wives here and there. For instance, Boorstin points out that Michael Faraday’s wife Sarah Bernard “never shared the scientific interests that kept him awake nights, but said she was happy to be ‘the pillow of his mind.'” (!) I do not demand parity (after all, it takes a room of one’s own) but in 700 pages, it became clear that Boorstin’s subtitle (A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself) was deliberate.

I was also not very comfortable with Boorstin’s occasional side trips to China or to Islamic cultures. His approach is to ask, “Why didn’t this culture engage in world exploration/ invent the printing press/ have mechanical clocks?” The implied, and sometimes the explicit, answer is always, “Because something in their culture prevented them from doing it the way we do.” But that is not how different cultures work. There isn’t one cultural norm that all other cultures would match if there weren’t internal obstacles. You can’t explain away cultural difference that way, or even adequately explain why a culture might not instantly adapt your wonderful invention once they see it. Cultures grow up organically for all sorts of reasons that I don’t have time to explain, including locally available foods, religions, trade and relationships with nearby nations, language, customs, kinship structures, government, and on and on. It makes their whole world view different, priorities and all. It’s a bit like asking me, “Why haven’t you succeeded at being a high-powered lawyer?” Because I never wanted to be one, is part of the reason why.

So. Pros and cons. This was a good, readable, interesting book full of anecdote and detail about the inventive people who have made Western Civilization what it is. But if I could, I’d have made it more well-rounded.

Posted in History, Nonfiction | 11 Comments

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Posted on January 25, 2017 by

grief-is-the-thing-with-feathersA man and his two sons are grieving the loss of his wife (and their mother) when a crow turns up, promising to stay until he wasn’t needed anymore. The crow observes the family, and the family tries to come to grips with their new reality. This little book by Max Porter tells their story through poems and vignettes that capture the thoughts, dreams, and observation of the dad, the boys, and the crow.

Here’s how the crow explains himself:

In other versions I am a doctor or ghost. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God. I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.

In this case, he’s probably a crow because the dad is a Ted Hughes scholar, and Hughes authored a poetry collection called Crow. I haven’t read that collection (in fact, I haven’t read much Hughes at all), and I kind of wish that I had because I wasn’t sure what to make of a crow’s presence in this book. Is he meant to be simply a sign that things are not normal, that the family is living a disrupted life? Is his leaving a sign that they’ve settled in to that new reality?

Grief, the title tells us, is the “thing with feathers”—an Emily Dickinson reference, though her feathered thing is hope. If we take the title at its word, the crow is grief itself. But a grief mixed with hope perhaps? The arrival of the crow breaks the dad out of a sort of daze, and he seems glad about that. Maybe the crow represents a sort of forward motion, going through the work of living on.

The boys are also aware of the crow as they work out their grief together and apart. They always appear together in the book, although it’s clear they have two different personalities. Some of the book’s best, most moving moments involve the boys. They tell lies to themselves and others about what happened to their mother. They make messes around the house so they’ll have a reason to miss her.

There are lots of arresting moments in this book, but I found it hard to connect with as a whole. It seemed to be trying so hard to be profound. It’s so meticulously put together that it never stopped feeling constructed—the effect was that of an exercise than a raw outpouring of grief. This book is part of the Tournament of Books this March, so I’ll be interested to see if others felt the same.

Most of the reviews I’ve seen have been strongly positive. Although this seemed like the kind of book I could like, I just never quite sunk into the concept of it. I’m wondering if my tendency these days to prefer straightforward storytelling was getting in my way here. It’s possible, although I hope this tendency passes because when I enjoy books like this, I tend to enjoy them very much, and I like to enjoy books! And many people have enjoyed this, and I could appreciate parts of it. But it wasn’t quite the book for me right now.

Posted in Fiction, Poetry | 11 Comments

Lanterns Across the Snow

Posted on January 23, 2017 by

lanterns-across-the-snow_0If you’re like me, you associate Susan Hill with Gothic spookiness (The Woman in Black) and/or murder (her series of Simon Serrailler mysteries.) Lanterns Across the Snow is neither one nor the other, though her usual predilections peek out in unexpected places.

This very short book (under 80 pages) is Fanny Hart’s reminiscence about a Christmas past — one that happened when she was nine years old and lived in the Wessex countryside, around the turn of the century. The memories take us from Christmas Eve, where her father is saying Evensong, to carolers awakening her from sleep, to presents on Christmas morning, to a few other surprises. The language is lush, detailed, and observant the way a child would be, of small emotional ups and downs: the glory of the snow and the intense cold, the quick smiles and frowns of parents, the bewilderment about God and his angels.

As I mentioned, Hill doesn’t let this quite fall into syrupy nostalgia. The brief prologue tells us that everyone in the narrative except Fanny is now dead, and she is the only one left to remember, which casts a slight shadow over the bright, happy proceedings. A death (though not a mysterious one) occurs on Christmas morning, and Fanny’s father, the vicar, is called away to attend to it. Poverty, death, birth, work, love, and glory are all glimpsed in this tiny work. It’s mostly the happy memories of a child — but there’s a touch of something else there.

I read this in an hour, for my book group (we didn’t want to assign too much over the holidays.) If you’re looking for something light and wintry to read, you might bookmark this one.

Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction | 5 Comments

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Posted on January 22, 2017 by

white-rageIn the prologue to this short, but devastating history, scholar Carol Anderson explains her title in this way:

White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

The book lays out the many ways this white rage used the system to tear down any instance of black advancement. She begins with the Reconstruction era, when southern whites reacted to emancipation of enslaved black people by enacting laws that limited their freedom and put them in a state of slavery in everything but name. When black Americans managed to acquire the means to move north to pursue something closer to freedom, the response was to stop the trains from moving at all. The response to desegregation of schools was to close the schools and, when that didn’t work, to winnow away at the law until it hardly had any effect. The Civil Rights movement led whites to posit a “color blind” society where wrongs didn’t need to be redressed because they no longer exist—if anything, they claimed, whites were the victims of efforts to redress past wrongs. And when a black man became president, the white power structure ramped up efforts to disenfranchise voters in non-white areas. Anderson addresses things like policing, the prison system, housing discrimination, and other ways that the system pushes back against black people’s advancement.

In short, this book is a history of systemic racism in the United States since the Civil War. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking and talking about it. (I read the final chapter, “How to Unelect a Black President” on January 20, and it was almost too much.)

There are several things I loved about this book. For one thing, it covers a lot of ground without being very long. The text is only about 166 pages. She also cites her sources, providing around 60 pages of notes. It is dense with information, as you might imagine, but it’s written in a very accessible style. It took me a while to read because I had to stop frequently to rage about something else. I also loved that she started after the Civil War. Although slavery was a grievous wrong from our history, Anderson doesn’t leave room for the argument that system racism ended with emancipation. This book is about everything that came after.

And, oh, how much came after. I grew up in Virginia in the 1970s and 80s, and I learned about racism, but the worst of it was treated as the violence of a few bad actors. And the rest, stuff like Jim Crow laws, was treated as a series of bumps along the way to progress. But there was little discussion of the arguments behind Jim Crow or of the deliberate attempts from within the system to keep black Americans from achieving equal access to good schools, good jobs, and good homes (and all of these elements are tied in together). In my adult life, I’ve picked up bits and pieces of information, particularly in the past few years, but this book did an excellent job showing how all those pieces work together. Many of the arguments used today to limit government benefits or privatize public schools, for example, are rooted in or are echoes of racist arguments from the past. It was startling!

I could fill this post with fact after fact, but what I really want is for more people to read this book and talk about it. It’s an important part of the conversation, especially given the new political world we Americans find ourselves in. So, to that end, I’m going to give away five copies of this book.

I only have two requests. If you get a copy, read it soon and tell someone about it, whether in conversation, on your blog or on social media. Share something you learned! I’d also like to limit the giveaway to U.S. readers. I love our international readers, but this book is very much centered on American racism, and, although I think readers outside the U.S. will find it interesting, the book does assume a basic familiarity with U.S. history and how our governing system operates. Many of you outside the U.S. have that knowledge, I know, but I also believe that because the specific examples of racism Anderson discusses is an American problem it’s up to us to do something about it. And getting educated in the history is an essential first step.

So, if you’d like a copy, let me know in the comments. If more than five people have expressed interest by Wednesday, I’ll throw the names into Random.org and select the first five names.

Edited on Thursday: I just did the drawing, and the winners are Elle, Florinda, Ann Marie, Jenny, and Jeanne!

Posted in History, Nonfiction | 25 Comments

Good Reading for Hard Times

Posted on January 20, 2017 by

Perhaps you are looking forward to today’s inaugural activities, either with pleasure or as a witness. Perhaps, however, like me, you have been absorbing the news with increasing concern (not to say despair — never despair), and, while you have been making plans for strong action in the coming years, you would like to spend today peacefully away from any source of news, reading something good.

Well, what’s good? Something purely escapist, that will help you forget it all for a few hours? Something uplifting, that will give you hope? Something by an author from a marginalized group, so you can show solidarity and maybe open up your horizons? Something that will remind you that literature and art are here to make connections in our world? I’ve got some suggestions for you!

If You Just Want to Forget Everything For A While:

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan. This novel, narrated by Jake Marlowe, a 201-year-old, whiskey-drinking aesthete of a werewolf, the last of his kind, is breathless, witty, ironic, fast-paced, and fabulous. Look out for purple prose, but it’s well-earned.

11/22/63 , by Stephen King. What if you could go back in time and change the world — but only to one specific spot? This is what happens to Jake Epping, who discovers he can travel back in time, but only to October, 1958. Can he save John Kennedy, and by so doing, save Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, millions in Vietnam? Find out in this great, suspenseful time-travel novel.

Bellwether, by Connie Willis. This is an extremely funny book about fads and chaos theory, luck, work, and inspiration, exasperation, and the way love can bloom in a weird environment. If it doesn’t make you laugh (even today), I’ll be very, very surprised.

Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier. If you’ve only read Rebecca, you’ve only just started. This is a thrilling, sinister Gothic romance in a great tradition, with touches only du Maurier can do right.

High Rising, by Angela Thirkell. Actually, you could read any of Thirkell’s Barsetshire Chronicles and be equally delighted, charmed, and amused, but this is the first one and it’s satisfying to start with.

If You Would Like Something Uplifting For a Change:

Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit. A book about how action results from and produces hope, even if we don’t know anything about our possible futures.

Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine. This wonderful, immensely readable book on neuropsychology first debunks many old experiments that claimed men were more intelligent or more able than women, then posits that our brains are molded by our environments. If we have a more just society, we will have more just brains. Simple as that, right?

Bird by Bird or Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. These books (about writing and the first year of having a baby, respectively) revolve around the importance of friendship, faith, love, sobriety, forgiveness, and Cheetos. They are some of my mainstays.

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Even the smallest person can make a difference.

Résistance: A Frenchwoman’s Journal of the War, by Agnès Humbert. This story of fighting back against the Nazi occupation of France will fill you with determination and pride.

If You Would Like to Create Solidarity With Your Reading:

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This letter to Coates’s son, inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (another good selection!) is an indictment, a memoir, and a manifesto.

Americanah, by Chimamandah Ngozi Adichie. This is a book about being an immigrant, about being a NAB (Non-American Black) in a racialized country, about being a woman in a patriarchy — and it’s also about a long relationship, and about the meaning of home.

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. This wordless book shows you what it means to make a life in a really, really new place.

There but for the, by Ali Smith. This novel is a marvelously strange construction of humor and seriousness, about a man who has been invited to a dinner party by total strangers (it’s implied that he’s there because he’s gay — they like to invite people who are “different.”) In the middle of the party, he goes upstairs, locks himself into the spare room, and won’t… come… out. The way Smith unfolds meaning like a paper flower from this premise is glorious.

All the Single Ladies, by Rebecca Traister. A comprehensive, readable, sensible look at single womanhood in the United States.

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich. This novel begins with a crime — rape and attempted murder — and should feel isolating. But it is about community and shared pain, and the complicated limits of that community. A great choice from a great author.

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson, is in the voice of a woman who has known abandonment and homelessness, poverty, loss, danger, and distance from mainstream, middle-class values all her life. Her deep, intuitive understanding, her reach for words to express her knowledge, and her yearning for love and relationship (even while she is wary of it) make this one of the best books I’ve read in years.

 

If you are reading today, I wish you peace and contentment. What will you be reading, if anything? What would you add to this list — any of the categories? Would you add a category? If you aren’t reading, what are you doing?

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Peacekeeper

Posted on January 19, 2017 by

peacekeeperIt’s often easiest to review books when they stay inside generic boundaries, and the smaller the box, the better. This is a cozy mystery, this is a thriller, this is a western. If you like what goes in this box, you’ll like this, because it goes in the box you like. Books that go in more than one box, or make up new boxes, or ooze outside of boxes altogether, are harder to review, and to recommend, because sometimes the things that make them worth reading are off-putting to people who don’t usually read those sorts of things (if there even is a “sort of thing” like that yet.)

Peacekeeper, by Christopher Bryan, is not quite as mightily genre-bending as all that. It’s mystery, and fantasy. It’s unabashedly Christian, but it doesn’t have the hectoring tone of the Left Behind series; it believes in a literal heaven and hell, but it isn’t about telling a certain segment of the population that they’re going to one place or another. It draws heavily on Charles Williams, on C.S. Lewis, and even on George Macdonald for inspiration, but it’s set in contemporary Britain.

Peacekeeper is the sequel to Siding Star, in which we met D.I. Cecelia Cavaliere and her officers of the peace, as well as her friend, the Anglican vicar Michael Aarons. In Siding Star, they averted a literally apocalyptic scenario through supernatural means, and Peacekeeper picks up just a few months later. The book begins with a murder-robbery that seems unconnected to anything that’s gone before. But this time, the evil Academy has a new plan for ending the world — global nuclear war — and the Detective Inspector learns about it only through her meticulous policing and her willingness to listen to what’s gone seriously wrong in her world.

This book is engaging, fast-paced, and reasonably well-written. There are visions, saints, and demons here, but the main power is that of the human will: apart from a little bit of time travel (Doctor Who fans will get a nod), the only real supernatural intervention is that of ideas. It is human beings — their greed, cowardice, pettiness, and lust for power, or on the other hand, their joy, love, delight, tenderness, humor, and loyalty — that decide what this earth will be. Bryan believes in the physical goodness of the earth, given by God: red wine, good food, sex, sunshine, and perhaps especially animals. Those who reject life, love, and goodness in favor of death, self, and cruelty are rejecting God himself. Bryan may be drawing on Charles Williams, but he doesn’t have his asceticism.

One criticism: Bryan doesn’t just get inspiration from C.S. Lewis, he outright cribs from him. There’s at least one scene and possibly two in this book that are simply taken from Lewis, in their exact outlines and much too precisely in some of their wording. I think Bryan is capable of writing originally; the trap of admiring someone else’s writing so much is a hard one.

There are at least two more books in this series. I have one more (Singularity) on my shelves, and I’ll see when I get to it. These are quick reads! I didn’t announce this at the beginning of January, just because I forgot to, but I’m spending at least this month and maybe February reading from my TBR shelves. They have gotten a little out of control — for me — at 38 books. (Remember that I do 98%+ of my reading from the library, and normally get books only at my birthday and Christmas!) I’m making good progress, so you may see Singularity here soon.

Posted in Fiction, Mysteries, Religion, Speculative Fiction | 2 Comments