Sunday Salon: Always Read the Book Before You Buy It.

One reason why there are so many Young Adult books reviewed on this website is that I am always on the look-out for titles I can use with my student book clubs.  Middle schoolers, like most readers, prefer new books to old ones so book club books tend to have a 'read by' date on their popularity. 

This year, a set of very generous parents asked for a short classroom wish list at Christmas.  Since I need sets of five copies for the book clubs and there's no money to buy anything this year, I put four titles on the list hoping I'd get one or two.  I got all four.   I started reading them all this weekend; I won't put them on the shelves in my classroom without reading them first.  Not anymore.  All four came well recommended, all four are very good, all four are books many of my students would enjoy.  Two of them have contain content that may not be suitable for middle school. 

I should have read them first.

Currently Reading:

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler.  I'm loving this book so far.  The narrator, Virginia, is the ugly duckling of her beautiful, successful family.  She is obsessed with her weight and with boys, not unlike many girls her age.  The book is funny, touching and deals with many subjects my students are dealing with.  But there have been two, very brief, scenes so far about her "boyfriend's" attempts to get to second base that could keep the book off of my book club shelves.  If I taught 9th grade, I wouldn't hesitate to use the book.  But I teach 7th.  I'm hesitating.

The Sledding Hill, by Chris Crutcher.  The narrator, Billy, dies in the opening chapters of the book.  His spirit sticks around to keep a watchful eye on his best friend Eddie whose father has also died.  Eddie is not having an easy time.  Things become more difficult once Eddie's mother starts a relationship with Rev. Tarter who runs a fundamentalist church when he isn't teaching at the local high school.  While there is no sex in The Sledding Hill, the subject of religion and how religion has treated and continues to treat those who disagree with it could prove problematic for a student book club book.  I'm currently leaning towards including The Sledding Hill.  The district rule is that if the book is in the school library, then it can be a book club book.  I need the school board's approval for a book if I intend to buy a full class set.

This Side of Paradise, by Steven L. Layne.  A Stepford Wives for the middle school set.  A very enjoyable thriller with better than average characterization and prose sure to appeal to a wide range of readers.  No objectionable content except for one evil parent.  It's possible some of my students who live in the better part of the Marin County town where I teach may find the perfect community describe in the book hits a little close to home.

Here Today, by Ann Martin.  This one came to me through a strong recommendation from a student.  Ann Martin achieved success through the Babysitters Club series but has since left baby sitting behind for more literary work.  I'm glad she did.  This one is very good so far, though I'm not sure yet exactly where it is going.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfield.  Not available in paperback yet so it won't be joining the book club for  a while.  Mr. Westerfield also wrote Uglies which is still popular with the girls.  It looks like this one will appeal to both boys and girls.

The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi.  Not a kids book.  Not at all.  I'm reading this one for me.  I love Mr. Bacigalupi's short stories; this is his first novel.  The cover art shows a caravan of traders on elephants walking out of a futuristic city with zeppelins flying around it.  How fun is that?  How could I resist?  I'm just ten pages in so it's too soon to say anything about it.

Paris Noir, edited by Aurelien Masson.  Short fiction with a noirish edge all of it set in Paris.  What's not to like about that?

Finished This Week:

The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly.  If I taught ninth grade, I'd use this book. It's marketed as an adult book, but many students would love it.  It's a bit too much for most of my 7th graders, but I may get a set of five for my book clubs if I can find them second hand.  At $15.00 a piece, five books would eat up too much of my book buying budget even back in the days when I had a book buying budget.

The Moment of Psycho, by David Thomson.  An entertaining meditation on Alfred Hitchcock's classic movie and it's influence on American culture.  A very quick read at under 200 pages, but it would have been a much better long article.  There used to be venues for longer works of non-fiction, novella length stuff, but not so many these days.  At 50 pages this would have been fantastic.  At 164, it's more than a bit padded.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie translated by Ina Rilke.  I read the entire book Friday night.  My book club will be meeting in just over three hours to discuss it.  I did not like it.  I can see why many people would like it, but I didn't.  I think my book club has fallen into the habit of picking easy books.  I've been thinking about the quote from Kafka that Gautami Tripathy has at the top of her blog: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."  My book club hasn't read anything like that in a long time. 

Short Story Saturday: No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

I've reviewed stories from No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July several times since I bought the book.  Here, here, here, here, and here.  I've been reading the stories a few at a time, one or two about every six weeks, to stretch out the book.

Ms. July's stories are fragile things, based on strange ideas that hit unexpectedly and uncomfortably close to home.  I suspect Ms. July knows my secrets but likes me anyway, which makes her happy to share hers with me.  I have the same feeling with Haruki Murukami, who is probably her secret brother.

So, I wanted to love the last four stories which I'd been saving for a wintry day.  I didn't.  Maybe they're not as good; maybe I shouldn't have read them all at once.  If you haven't read Miranda July, I think you should.  I think she's wonderful, when she's wonderful.  Read "The Swim Team," "Majesty," "This Person," and "It Was Romance."  But please consider my advice--don't read too many at once.

Friday Picture Reading: Berthe Morisot

La Lecture (Reading: The Mother and Sister Edma of the Artitst) 1869-1879 by Berthe Morisot.

To learn more about the artist and to see more of her work go here.

American Rust by Philipp Meyer

Isaac's mother was dead five years, but he hadn't stopped thinking about her.

Opening line to American Rust by Philipp Meyer.

American Rust by Philipp Meyer could almost be considered a piece of historical fiction.  The setting is the present, but it's also a Pennsylvania steel town, long after the mill has closed.  The problems faced by towns like Buell are still current, but there's a feeling that the rest of America has moved on, both in this reader and in the book itself.  The problems of former factory towns just seem so last administration.  Even the characters in the novel  have the sense that they should have moved on.  Why are they still hanging around?

One character, Isaac English, is not hanging around anymore, not if he can help it.  Isaac has stolen 4,000 dollars from his father who was forced into retirement after an injury and whom Isaac stayed home to care for instead of going away to college like his older sister did.  Isaac intends to go to Berkeley to enroll in the University of California.  His best friend from high school, Billy Poe is along for the ride.  Billy has not done well since he turned down the football scholarship he was offered several years before.  The only reason he is not in jail when the novel opens is that the local police chief and Billy's mother Grace are sometime lovers.  Once, Grace intended to leave Buell, but Billy's father made that impossible.  Since he's left her, she finds her growing attraction to Police Chief Harris is doing the same thing.  Harris is the only one among the characters who seems genuinely happy to live in Buell, though even he longs for better times for the town and for himself.

Events spin out of control early in the novel when Isaac and Billy run into trouble with a group of homeless men.  When one man accosts Billy, Isaac throws a large ball bearing at him, striking the man in the head and killing him.  The two young men run from the scene, leaving behind two witnesses and Billy's high school Varsity jacket.  Chief Harris finds the jacket and hides it to protect the son of the woman he loves, but he cannot keep Billy out of jail once the state police become involved in the investigation.  Billy will not name Isaac as the one who killed the drifter, intending to protect his friend so that someone he cares about can finally make it out of Buell.

American Rust is a character study that is also a crime thriller.  Mr. Meyer shifts the book's perspective from character to character creating full portraits of each while  using this device to build narrative tension.  Though American Rust is a portrait of the aftermath of the death of a way of life, it's also something of a page turner.   But just something.  Whether or not the state police will catch Isaac, or discover how deeply Chief Harris has tried to cover-up the crime is not the primary concern of American Rust.  Mr. Meyer is much more interested in character study.  His interest is in how each character reacts to the situation, how each tries to reconcile their desire to escape Buell with the knowledge that they must leave others behind to do it.

Mr. Meyer's main strength as a writer is his ability to makes his characters  real, flawed and fully developed. This also means he cannot make them entirely sympathetic.  Whether or not individual readers find them sympathetic enough will influence their reaction to what the characters do.  Everyone makes choices in life, and everyone makes bad choices at least now and then, but the characters in American Rust habitually make them.  So much so that I began to lose sympathy for them.  American Rust has been favorably and fairly compared to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  The two novels share so many plot, narrative and thematic elements that they are brothers under the skin.  But the reader never loses sympathy for George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men.  Mr. Steinbeck's novel is making a point about American society so his characters must remain sympathetic.  Although Mr Meyer's book is set in similar circumstances, he is not acting as a social critic.  By the end of American Rust, by the middle of it for that matter, it's difficult to blame anyone but the characters in the book for the sorry conditions of their lives. 

American Rust has won an impressive array of awards and "Best of ..." mentions and there's already a movie in the works.  Phillip Meyer may be an author worth keeping an eye on; this is his first novel.  Kristin has an excellent interview with him over at Book Club Classics.  Honestly, I would not want to have my first novel compared to John Steinbeck; that's an awfully high standard to live up to.  I'm not yet convinced that Mr. Meyer has done it, but the times certainly seem ripe for another John Steinbeck to come along.

Full disclosure:  American Rust appears here as part of a TLC Virtual Book Tour.  I received a free copy of the book from the publisher.  You can find a full schedule for the virtual book tour here.

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem

The eighth World Futurological Congress was held in Costa Rica.

Opening to The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem took me by surprise.  The author wrote the novel Solaris which was made into a classic Russian movie, perhaps the only classic Russian science fiction picture of the Soviet era.  Solaris is a serious piece, very similar to 2001: A Space Odessy.  The Futurological Congress is a comic romp similar to early Kurt Vonnegut or Kilgore Trout.  It's a wild ride.

The protagonist, Ijon Tichy is a cosmonaut sent to attend the Eighth Futurological Congress which is being held at a luxury hotel  in Costa Rica.  A group of revolutionaries attack the city by releasing a hallucinogenic drug into the water system of the hotel sending scores of scientist into the streets where they are confronted by competing death squads.  After Tichy is shot, he is flashfrozen into suspended animation to be cured at a later date.  He wakes up in 2039 to find a future stranger than anything anyone at the congress ever dreamed of.

But the plot isn't important. Mr. Lem uses his storyline about the future to parody his own present, and he's quite good at it.  Early in the novel he describes a modification The Futurological Congress made to accommodate the large numbers of scientists who have papers to present:

Each speaker was given four minutes to present his paper, as there were so many scheduled--198 from 64 different countries. To help expedite the proceedings, all reports had to be distributed and studied beforehand, while the lecturer would speak only in numerals, calling attention in this fashion to the salient paragraphs of his work.  To better receive and process such wealth of information, we all turned on our portable recorders and pocket computers (which later would be plugged in for the general discussion.)  Stan Hazelton of the U.S. delegation immediately threw the hall into a flurry by emphatically repeating: 4, 6, 11 and therefore 22;  5, 9, hence 22;  3, 7, 2, 11, from which if followed that 22 and only 22!!  Someone  jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22.  I turned to the number key in his paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world.

The end of the world yes, but The Futurological Congress was published in the early 1970's when Kurt Vonnegut was producing books like Breakfast of Champions, Woody Allen's Sleeper was in theatres, and "Kilgore Trout's" novel Venus on the Halfshell was released.  The end of the world was much more fun in those days. 




Full Disclosure: I found the picture of Stanislaw Lem on Wikipedia.

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh

The war had been the bloodiest yet, particularly for the civilians.

Opening to After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh.

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh tells a story many people probably don't want to hear.  We like to keep our heroes heroic.  We like to see World War II as "the good war, " the soldiers who fought it as "the greatest generation."  When we talk about Germany after the war, we brag about how generous the Marshall plan was.  But what happened in Germany immediately after the war was not so great.  The fact that what so many Germans did before the end was far worse doesn't change that.  Human suffering is human suffering.

Giles MacDonogh, to his credit, deals with this question in his book's preface.

This book is about the experience of the Germans in defeat. It is about the occupation imposed on them following the criminal campaigns of Adolf Hitler.  To some extent it is a study in resignation, their acceptance of any form of indignity in the knowledge of the great wrongs perpetrated by the National Socialist state.  Not all of these Germans were involved in these crimes, by any means, but with few exceptions they recognized that their suffering was an inevitable result of them. I make no excuses for the crimes the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible desire for revenge that they aroused.

After the Reich begins where most war stories end.  What happens to the civilian population of a defeated nation?  What happens to the soldiers in the defeated army?  Who is to be held responsible for the war?  What price shall they pay? 

Some histories aim for understanding by focusing on a narrow range of topics, while others try to cover the entire breadth of an event or period.  After the Reich is of the latter type. Mr. MacDonogh divides After the Reich into four sections.   The first section, Chaos, deals with life during and immediately after the closing days of the war in Europe.  What happened is best characterized by rape and ethnic cleansing.  If you were a woman, and the Russian army found you in territory once occupied by the German army, you would almost certainly be raped.  You were much safer if the Americans or the British found you, but you were not completely safe.  After the fall of Nazi Germany millions of ethnic Germans were forced to leave their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and what was once Prussia.  It did not matter if you were a former Nazi, a child, a former inmate of a concentration camp or Jewish.  The lines on the map had been redrawn; all Germans had to go.  Many did not survive.

The second section, Allied Zones, is a detailed description of daily life in each of the Zones of occupied Germany.  What was once the most feared nation on earth, was divided into Russian, American, British, French Zones, each controlled by a different set of rules and laws.  While the quality of life differed from zone to zone, certain characteristics were common in all four.  Food was remarkably scare as one would expect.  What little shelter had survived intact was soon taken over by the occupying forces.  To survive, large numbers of German women turned to prostitution or took lovers.  The adult population of each zone was largely female.  While money existed, almost all real business used cigarettes as currency.  Orphaned children could be found hiding in piles of rubble, living like wild animals.  Many did not survive the first winter after the war.

Crime and Punishment, section three of After the Reich, will be familiar territory to fans of The Third Man.  Carol Ballard's film, based on a novella by Graham Greane, is mentioned by Mr. MacDonogh as a very accurate representation of life in occupied Vienna.  Everyone sought what they needed to survive on the black market.  Theft was everywhere.  The way the allies divided authority over Germany and Austria kept everything in a state of confusion.  While he trials of former Nazi officials are not the main concern of After the Reigh,  Mr. MacDonogh shines a critical light on them.  Although some of the surviving high ranking Nazis did face trial and eventual execution,  the trials then moved on to relatively small fish.  Most of those guilty of criminal acts were never tried.  Section four, The Road to Freedom, deals briefly with the beginning of the cold war and the realization that both sides needed Germany as an ally to keep the other side in check.  This turns out to be the main motivation for the eventual reconstruction of Germany.  It's interesting to discover that early on Stalin offered to give East Germany it's freedom if all sides agreed to make united Germany a neutral state.  His offer was refused.

After the Reich is not easy reading. While not intended as an academic book, it's not aimed at a wide general audience.  But if we believe the maxim that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, then don't we have to make an effort to remember it?  The U.S. is currently occupying two countries we conquered in battle.  While the situation is not as extreme by any measure, history holds valuable lessons that could prove useful for understanding Iraq and Afghanistan.  Over 60 years since the end of World War II or over 6,000 miles between New York and Iraq, seen from a great distance of either time or space it easy to overlook how terrible the experience of occupation can be and to overlook that the price paid is paid by both the guilty and the innocent alike. 

NIghtwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko

The escalator crept along slowly, straining upward.

Opening to Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko, translated by Andrew Bromfield.

The balance between light and dark must be maintained.  Should either gain an upper hand on the other, the resulting conflict would be a disaster for all of humanity.  To prevent this, each side watches the other.  The Nightwatch keeps a close eye on everything the forces of darkness do, just as the Daywatch monitors the forces of light.  This way neither side can do anything unsanctioned, anything that would give them  the upper hand in the eternal struggle of light versus dark.

This is the basic set-up for Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko, the best-selling urban fantasy from Russian.  Of course, if everyone played by the rules, there would be no story, nothing for the hero, Anton Gorodetsky who is reluctantly assigned field work tracking down rogue vampires, to do.   In the three novella length stories that make up Nightwatch Mr. Lukyanenko creates an interesting alternate Moscow for his characters called The Twilight.  The Twilight is an in-between state, removed from the world humanity inhabits but at the same time within or along side it.  Mages and other magical creatures can move in and out of The Twilight, unseen by the humans around them.  This makes is possible for the forces of light and darkness to have a violent confrontation within a crowded subway station unseen by any of the people there.  It's kind of cool.

Nightwatch is not great art, but it is successful escapist fantasy.  Fantasy creates its own worlds, its own set of rules for those worlds.  Whether or not those worlds work depends on the details.  Mr. Lukyanenko provides plenty of details: a rich cast of characters both light and dark, an in-depth history of The Twilight dating back 1000's of years, and a set of laws/codes that the characters must follow.  It's the tension between what the laws require and what Anton Gorodetsky thinks is right that the moral conflicts in Nightwatch lie.

The Nightwatch is run by a very old, very powerful mage, Boris Ignatievich.  Boris has been watching over Europe since the 15th century.  At times, he has tried to influence history by setting certain people and ideas in motion that he hopes will lead to better lives for the human race.  These have always ended in disaster.  Think World War II.   In present day Moscow, Boris must keep a close eye on his Daywatch counterpart, Zebulon who has spent so much time in The Twilight that his features have taken on demonic characteristics.  Boris and Zebulon  are kept in check by a set of treaties that each must obey.  The treaties ensure that neither the light nor the dark will be responsible for a calamity as great as a war, but they do not protect all humanity.  Peace comes at a price.

In one story, a rogue mage is killing members of the Daywatch.  Anton is given the job of stopping these killings.  The problem is, the victims are Daywatch members who regularly do harm to humans: vampires, werewolves.  As part of the treaties that maintain the peace, they are allowed occasional human victims.  Anton begins to wander if maintaining the treaties is the right way to deal with the Daywatch or if the rogue killer has a better idea.  Meantime, there is the question of what to do with new mages.  At a certain age, a handful of human children realize they have magical powers.  Sometimes just a little, nothing worth noting, but on occasion great power which makes them very important to both the Daywatch and the Nightwatch.  Every person with power must decide which they will join, no exceptions.  Neither side is supposed to influence the decision according to the treaties, but both try everything they can. 

Nightwatch has sold over 25 million copies but is not that well known in the U.S.  I was intrigued by the notion of a Russian best-seller.  Russian literature consistently turns out not to be what I expected.  I'm not enough of a fan of urban fantasy to seek out the remaining three books in the Nightwatch series, but if I see the phrase "Bestseller from Russia" on something else, I expect I'll give it a look.  Russian literature is full of surprises.

As part of the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge I watched the recent movie adaptation of Nightwatch.  Taking something as complicated as the Nightwatch stories and adapting them to film is not an easy job.  To the filmmakers' credit, they do not try to include everything, but even though they limit themselves to the first story they still  include too much.  This kind of movie tends to include every ounce of back story possible.  (I've little patience for back story.  I don't care how Batman came to be Batman--he's Batman; get on with the story.)  If you've not read Nightwatch, the movie will be a challenge to follow.  If you have read the novel, you've already had the superior experience, so why bother with the movie?  Still, it was enough of a hit in Russia to warrant production of the second part.  You can get a very good sense of the movie from the trailer, so here it is.

Sunday Salon: Don't take it personally.

Whenever someone doesn't like a book I do, I take it a little personally.  I know this is irrational.  I'm not the one being rejected, the book is.  I've no vested interest in any of the books I recommend--I'm not getting any money out of this and I didn't write the books!  But it hurts, a little.

This week one book  and one author I love were rejected.  Jackie at FarmLaneBooks read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson based on my recommendation.  She linked to my review and everything.  Jackie's blog is excellent and she gets much more traffic than I do, so a prominent link there could produce an uptick in the number of visitors I get here.  But she hated the book.  She really hated it.  She was nice about it, but she hated it.  Many more people hated it in the comments.

Eva over at A Stripped Armchair wrote a wonderful review of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.  She did not like it very much to say the least.  Her commenters largely agreed with her, though Mr. Dickens did have a few defenders.  I love Charles Dickens.  If I only get the works of one author to take to the desert Island, I'm taking Charles Dickens.  If I only get one book, I'm taking David Copperfield.  (And I'm hiding an omnibus copy of Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin inside my jacket.)

I don't think this is really going anywhere, it's just something I've been thinking about.

This week I finished two books:

Under the Dome by Stephen King.  Mr. King can always be counted on to deliver the goods.  Under the Dome is not classic Stephen King, but it is good entertainment none-the-less.  His fans will not be disappointed.  At 1072 pages Under the Dome comes to three cents a page if you pay the full hardcover price of 35 dollars.  Three cents a page is a pretty good deal.

Benediction by Jim Arnold came to me as an ARC via a review request from the author himself.  In general, this is not a good sign, but I loved it.  It's about a 46-year-old gay man facing prostate cancer.  Over the course of his treatment he loses his boyfriend, almost loses his best friend, falls off the wagon and starts drinking again, loses his job and is haunted by several ghosts.  But, while there was no outright laughter, the overall tone of the book is comic.  I appreciated a story about illness that was not meant to be inspirational.

Reading now:

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.  I'm taking my time with this one, 50 pages a day. Some of the characters went to the International Exhibition in Paris of 1900 in the section I read yesterday.  Byatt's descriptions of it make me long to travel back in time.  Her detailed prose is evocative and rich.  She can put the reader back into her historical setting and she takes enough time with her story that we can walk around and get to know the place a little.  I'm loving it.  But I'm also finding it curiously devoid of passion. 

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly.  I'll probably finish this one today or tomorrow.  It's very good. 

If you've read any of these and didn't like them, please feel free to say so.  I'll try not to take it personally.

Short Story Saturday: Tio Gilberto and the 27 Ghosts

This one is a keeper. 

Before I can even ring, Uncle Gilberto opens the door and gives me a big hug and a kiss that smells of gin and menthol cigarettes. His dog, Ganymede, barks and snuggles his head between my legs. The cat eyes me suspiciously from the next room. From behind me, someone helps me slip off my jacket. I look over my shoulder, but nobody’s there. “Who’s that?” I ask my uncle.


“That’s Daniel,” he says.


“Hey, Daniel,” I say. “Been a while.”


Gilberto shakes a finger at the air behind me. “No, you cannot also take his shirt! I told you to behave.” Uncle Gil throws both hands into the air. “Dios mío, what have I done? Bringing my innocent nephew into a house with twenty-seven horny ghosts. Qué barbaridad. You tell me right away if any of them try anything, me entiendes, James?”

"Tio Gilberto and the 27 Ghosts" by Ben Francisco is a short that charms readers and then haunts them.  It has stayed with me for a week now and will stay on my iPod for much longer. 
 
James leaves New York City seeking refuge from the world and his life with his Uncle Gilberto who lives in a big house in San Francisco's Castro District.  Uncle Tio is an old-school queen.  He lives with his dog and the ghosts of the 27 men who once shared his life and his home.  Ghosts are stuck in time as is Gilberto.  They spend the days re-watching old movies, singing old show-tunes, camping it up like they did before gay liberation--eternity as one long afternoon tea-dance.
 
James is young, finding his first love in a new city, promising his uncle that he will always "wear a raincoat."  He loves his uncle and gets along with the ghosts but how does one tell a new boyfriend that you live with 27 men only your uncle can see?  James' problem is made more difficult by the fact that his new boyfriend, his first boyfriend, is far less than perfect.  James, in the throws of first love, makes mistakes because he is  blinded by his emotions.  Been there; done that.
 
"Tio Gilberto and the 27 Ghosts" by Ben Francisco is not for children and parts of it are NSFW.  It is funny, it is charming, it entertains and it stays with you afterwards.  You can hear it for yourself at Podcastle.  I recommend it.

Dakota's Favorites: Symptomatic by Danzy Senna

I'm surprised to see that I only gave Symptomatic by Danzy Senna four out of five stars.  It was one of those odd books I picked up for some reason I can't remember, but it has stuck with me ever since I read it back in January of 2008.  I've Ms. Senna's novel Caucasia in my TBR stack and plan on reading it sometime this year.

Symptomatic by Danzy Senna reminded me so much of Notes on a Scandal that I started to wonder which story influenced the other. Symptomatic predates the movie but who knows how source material can influence an artist. (See Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields for a book that deals with just this issue.)

Symptomatic is the story of a young woman, on a writing fellowship and alone in New York for the first time, who forms an unusual friendship with an older colleague, Greta. Greta becomes more possessive and controlling as the novel progresses, eventually forcing the narrator to break off the friendship. Sounds a lot like Notes on a Scandal so far. The "scandal" in Symptomatic if there is one, is that both the narrator and Greta are of mixed race and can pass as either black or white depending on how they choose to dress and to act. The black people they meet assume they are black and the white people they meet assume they are white. The narrator is not exactly sure where she fits in or where she wants to fit in and her friendship with Greta does not make the situation any easier, though Greta sees her as a kindred spirit, someone who knows what she is going through.

Symptomatic takes on the tone of a psychological thriller early on. There is clearly something wrong with Greta from the beginning, but the narrator tries to convince herself and her readers that things are okay. The events of the novel, both those Greta reacts to and those she initiates, lead us to conclude that Greta is unbalanced well before the narrator finally ends their friendship. What happens in the end, seems to come out of left field to me, but you can decide for yourself. Overall, I found the issues of identity to be very interesting, not ones I had ever considered before, and the psychological suspense to be fairly gripping.

So even with an ending that was a little too Fatal Attraction for my taste, I'm giving Symptomatic by Danzy Senna four out of five stars.

Cracker! by Cynthia Kadohata

Grrrr!

Opening to Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata.

I believe stories about dogs should come with a disclaimer  stating whether or not the dog lives.  If you read stories about dogs, you probably understand my position.  While I can take dark, dystopian science fiction, stories with psychotic serial killers as protagonists, pain and suffering piled on top of angst and despair, if the dog dies, I do not want to read the book. 

This is not a rational position, I know.  I cannot justify it; I simply acknowledge it.

So.  If you want to know if whether or not the dog dies before you read Cracker, simply leave your contact information in a comment.  I'll be happy to let you know in an email.  No spoilers here. 

Cracker!The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata has been very popular with my students this year. Hardly a day goes by that I don't see at a student with a copy of it in their hands during lunch or study hall.  So, I took a copy home over winter break and read it.  I can see why it's so popular.

Cracker is a German Shephard, happily living with Willie, a boy who lives with his mother and father in the Chicago area in the early 1970's.  When Willie's father loses his job and the family is forced to move into an apartment, Cracker must find a new home.  Instead of surrendering her to a shelter, Willie gives her to the army which is looking for dogs it can train to sniff out booby traps in Vietnam.  The book follows Cracker through boot-camp where she is assigned to Rick Hanski, a young man who volunteered for the army.  Rick and Cracker train together as a team and are sent to serve in the closing days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.  Though Cracker's performance in Vietnam is heroic by any standards, her life is threatened when the army decides not to bring the sniffer dogs home at the end of the war. Most were put-down; some were assigned to the South Vietnamese army.  Rick, who is sent home early due to a wound, begins a letter writing campaign to everyone he can think of hoping to get Cracker back. 

Cracker! is not high art.  Kadohata is interested in telling her young audience a good story and tell a good story she does.  Her characters are three dimensional enough and entirely believable, even when we are reading Cracker's thoughts and feelings.  Ms. Kadohata's writing is crisp, clean, to the point.  While very good, it never gets in the way of the plot.  Her depiction of the war is exciting rather than disturbing.  She does mention the bad stuff, but the book never leaves the realm of an adventure tale to become an anti-war novel.  In fact, I found it a bit pro-war myself.  While no one will ever confuse it with The Call of the Wild, in the end, Cracker! is completely safe for kids.

If you find the child in your life looking it over on the shelf in the bookshop or the local library, don't hesitate to get it for them.  I don't think it will change anyone's life, but it will certainly keep everyone reading through to the end.

A Brave Vessel by Hobson Woodward

To William Strachey the new play by William Shakespeare seemed oddly familiar.

From the Preface to A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest by Hobson Woodward.

It turns out Shakespeare's The Tempest was based on a true story.  Who knew?

Shakespeare wrote The Tempest at the end of his career-- some say it contains his farewell to the theatre in one of Prospero's speeches.  The year was 1609 and England's Jamestown colony was the media sensation of the day.  Things had not gone well for England's only New World colony.  London was full of satirical accounts, making fun of the on-going failure that was Jamestown.  This made it difficult for those running the colony to find investors and colonists.  One prospective colonist was William Strachey, a respectable gentleman who wanted to be a writer like Shakespeare.  Strachey hoped that by joining the colony he could become a chronicler of it and thereby make a name for himself as a writer.

It did not go well.  A few days from Jamestown's shore, the expedition  ran into a hurricane.  The Sea Venture, the fleet's flagship which housed Strachey and over 100 other passengers, survived the storm but did not make it to the Virginia coast.  The ship came aground on the shores of Bermuda, at that time an unihabited island claimed by Spain.  Everyone onboard survived the storm.  Previous explorers had stocked the island with pigs, hoping to make it a regular food stop for future use, so there was plenty of meat for the castaways along with abundant fresh water and various fruits.

Strachey did keep an account of what happened to the castaways on Bermuda.  Eventually they built a ship and finished the voyage to Virginia where they joined the starving Jamestown colony arriving just in-time with a boat full of fresh pork.  Strachey sent detailed letters about the shipwreck and life in the colony to a mysterious woman rumored to be his benefactor.  He hoped she would publish them and later support his poetry as she had done for several other writers.  While she did not publish the letters they were widely circulated and appear to have come to the attention of William Shakespeare who may have based much of the action of his new play The Tempest on them.

Mr. Woodward presents impressive textual evidence to support this theory.  For example there are many striking similarities between the  wreck of The Sea Venture as described in William Strachey's letters and Shakespeare's The Tempest.  However, while it is highly probable that Shakespeare was influenced by the letters, there is no smoking gun, nothing that forces the reader to accept Mr. Woodward's evidence as convincing.  Reasonable doubt remains. 

That said, A Brave Vessel is both an interesting and entertaining book.  If you've ever dreamed of being marooned on an island paradise, it may open your eyes some.  If you're a fan of Shakespeare's, there is much enlightenment regarding the origins of his plays and their production in A Brave Vessel.  I like the idea that Prospero may be based on fact.  He's long been one of my favorite characters in Shakespeare.  I think maybe because he liked books so much.  After all, his library was one thing he made sure to save from the shipwreck that marooned him and his daughter.  The only thing Prospero valued as much as the life of his child was his books.

Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol

A rather pretty little chaise on springs, such as bachelors, half-pay officers, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs--in short, all such as are spoken of as "gentlemen of the middling sort"-- drive about in, rolled in at the gates of the hotel of the provincial town of N.

Opening to chapter one of Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogal.

I started off last year reading another Russian novel, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevesky which ended up being one of my favorite reads of the year.  (Dakota enjoyed the book as well.  She ate it last July.)  I had very little experience with Russian novels, other than the first two thirds of Anna Karinina I'd not read anything.   Besides being an excellent pyschological thriller, Crime and Punishment is a very funny book.  I was surprised by how funny it was.  I'd always been led to believe that Russian novels were difficult stuff.

Look at the cover of Dead Souls.  Does it look funny to you?  Dead souls?  How could that be funny?

Nicholai Gogol wrote one of my all-time favorite short stories, "The Nose", about a man whose nose runs out on him one day to lead a life that is much more exciting and glamorous than the life it led while a part of the man's face.  It's difficult to get your nose back once it's found out how much fun it can have without you.  It's a very funny story.

Dead Souls is a very funny novel.  The hero, Tchitchikov, is a "gentleman of the middling" sort without significant money or land.  He develops a plan to become wealthy by buying up dead serfs.  Serfdom in Russia was a form of slavery that lasted throughout much of the 19th century.  When Gogol wrote Dead Souls the Russian government taxed landowners based on how many serfs they owned at the time of the most recent census.  Since the census was only done once every ten years, if a serf died before the next census, the owner had to continue paying taxes on the 'dead soul' until it could be officially counted as dead.  Tchitchikov intends to acquire as many dead souls as he can by taking them off the hands of their owners as a gracious act of kindness and then use them as collateral for a large bank loan.  He'll then use the loan to purchase an estate with actual serfs on it.

Unfortunately, everyone Tchitchikov encounters is immediately suspicious of his plan.  They cannot figure out why he wants dead serfs but they suspect he is up to something and they all want in on it.  No one will give him their dead serfs, some refuse to sell them outright, others force him to pay high prices for them.  The pattern repeats in various forms as Tchitchikov travels from town to town, estate to estate, trying to explain how much money can be saved by avoiding the tax on dead serfs if only he can have them. 

Gogol intended to make Dead Souls the first part of a trilogy of books reflecting Dante's Divine Comedy.  He burned all but five chapters of the second book before he died.  Dead Souls is his only completed novel.

The more you understand the subject matter, the better satire works, so I imagine that my lack of knowledge about Russian history kept me from getting all of the jokes in Dead Souls, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly none-the-less. Gogol's sense of humor is probably not for everyone, but it's right up my alley.  He manages to point out the absurdity of his society without letting on how completely he is undermining it.  Of course this is a man who wrote a story about a nose cutting out on a face just to spite it.  And the next time someone mentions Russian novels, don't think depressing, don't thing dreary, think funny. 

While Dead Souls does not contain any particular gay or lesbian themes, Nicolai Gogol's only known love affair was with another man, so I'm counting Dead Souls towards The Challenge that Dare Not Speak It's Name.

The Sunday Salon: My First One

After several years of book blogging, I've decided to join The Sunday Salon.  Unfortunately, The Sunday Salon already has 500 members, which is the maximum number of links the web-host will allow.  (I'm not at all sure 'web-host' is the correct term.)  If you're last to the party, do not be surprised to find all the good bean dip is gone, I guess.  I'm going to go ahead and use The Sunday Salon button as though I were an actual member and just hope no one minds. 

I'm not exactly sure how The Sunday Salon is supposed to work.  The general directions are a bit vague.  Instead of the usual book reviews, you're supposed to blog in broader terms, about the books you're reading, about reading and books in general, or about what's going on in your life.  As I type this I'm staring at an impressive pile of books.  Ten.  Six, I've read and not reviewed yet, four I'm currently reading.  There are five more in the dining room waiting for me to begin and an unkown number at the library on the hold shelf waiting to be picked up. 

Read but not reviewed yet:

• American Rust by Philipp Meyer
• After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh
• No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
• The Futrological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
• Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko
• Under the Dome by Stephen King

Currently Reading

• The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
• The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
• Benediction by Jim Arnold
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

Waiting in the Dining Room

• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
• Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen
• Pealed by Joan Bauer
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
• The Moment of Psycho by David Thomson

On the Hold Shelf at the Library

•  ?

It's a good thing I don't have cable.

Of the ten books I've read and not reviewed yet or started but not finished yet there are four I'd strongly recommend and one I may not finish.

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July is excellent. I've reviewed stories from it for Short Story Sunday, which is now Short Story Saturday, several times.  I finished the last four stories during winter break.  The last four were not among the best ones, but I'd still like to get a final post about the book up.  It's a book I'll be keeping.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt is top-notch Byatt.  I've just finished the long opening party scene, which I loved.  I think Ms. Byatt is truly in her element this time around.  Lots of very rich characterization, plot and subplot, literary references and details and books withing the book.  This one may be as good as Possession which is one of my all time favorites.  I have very high hopes.

Benediction by Jim Arnold has turned out be be a successful dark horse.  The author contacted me in early December and asked if I'd be interested in reading and reviewing his novel.  I agreed, though I've become more and more skeptical with Advanced Review Copies over time.  But I'm loving this one.  I should have a full review up soon, but if you come across a copy, please look it over.  I'm liking it a lot so far.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly was chosen by readers of this blog to be the first book I start in 2010.  It was a bit slow to start, but I'm 150 pages in at this point and may just sit down tomorrow and read the rest of it straight through.  I'm considering getting a set for my student book clubs.  It's marketed as an adult book, but I think my more precocious readers would like it.  If I taught tenth grade, I'd look into getting a class set. 

I may not finish Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union.  I'm having some trouble following the story and even more trouble caring.  It's supposed to be a detective story, but there hasn't been much detecting in it so far.  Lots and lots of business about the alternate history it's set in, one in which the Jews of Europe flee not to Isreal after World War II but to Sitka, Alaska.  I've begun to fear that Mr. Chabon may have said all he had to say with Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  If you haven't read Michael Chabon, read one or both of those.  In fact, writing this has helped me make up my mind.  I have far too many books in my TBR pile to spend time finishing one I'm not enjoying.  Detectives should spend their time detecting! 

Now, I'm off to the library to see what's on the hold shelf.

Short Story Sunday Moves to Saturday: "The Blessed Days" by Mike Allen

I've been thinking about making changes here at Ready When You Are, C.B. since just before New Year's.  I am going to keep Friday Picture Reading and Dakota's Favorites going through 2010.  But I've decided to move Short Story Sunday to Saturday and to make it an occasional feature rather than keep up the pressure of weekly posts.  My plan is to post reviews of single stories when I find one that deserves it and to post reviews of entire collections and anthologies once I finish them.  I've been thinking about joining in on Sunday Salons now and then, too.  Stop by tomorrow to see how that goes.  

Short Story Saturday:  "The Blessed Days" by Mike Allen

If you are a fan of horror fiction, especially a fan of dark horror fiction, you owe it to yourself to give Mike Allen's "The Blessed Days" a listen.  The stories hero has been plagued by debilitating recurring nightmares his entire life.   He has sought help from sleep scientists as well as less reputable dream experts, to no avail.  But his dreams, along with the dreams of everyone else on earth stop altogether after The Blessing begins.

One night, humanity experiences The Blessing simultaneosly, as everyone wakes to find themselves covered in blood.  Their own blood, which has leaked out of every pore in their body at once, just before they awoke. This continues to happen everytime they fall asleep over the following two and a half years.  No one dreams; everyone wakes up covered in blood. 

How creepy is that?

Mr. Allen's story is a tribute to the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, the kind of story about the unleashing of dark and primitive gods, gods who demand blood sacrifice and give nothing in return that Clive Barker wrote about in his Books of Blood series.  If it's not your sort of thing you'll run away screaming as soon as it begins.  In fact, you may have run away already.  But if you're a fan of dark horror fiction, you really should give it a listen.  It's very good.  It kept me sitting in my car in the parking lot at work listening.  At National Public Radio they call that a driveway moment, but I don't think "The Blessed Days" is quite what they had in mind.

You can listen to Mike Allen's story "The Blessed Days" over at Pseudopod.

Full disclosure: I found the picture on flickr here.

Friday Picture Reading

The Bookworm by Norman Rockwell from the Saturday Evening Post's website here.

Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. by Stefan Aust

Thirty-eight minutes past midnight. This is German Radio with an important news flash.

Opening to chapter one of Baader-Meinhof by Stefan Aust.

Baader-Meinhoff: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., Stefan Aust's book about the Red Army Faction a terrorist group active in West Germany during the 1970's, offers an interesting counterpoint to John Berger's  From A to X reviewed here yesterday.   While Mr. Berger's novel asks readers to sympathize with a romantic vision of his characters, Mr. Aust's non-fiction account of an actual terrorist organization makes sympathy for those involved nearly impossible.

Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff, the two 'leaders' of the Red Army Faction, were not romatically linked but they did form the nexus of a group of young radicals determined to undermine the political/social system of West Germany in the late 1960's.  As was the case with the movements that became Al-Qaeda, the Red Army Faction was radicalized by  government corruption and violence--  Al-Qaeda by the torture their early leaders experienced in Egyptian prisons as covered in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, the Red Army Faction by the violent attack on a peaceful anti-Shah demonstration that ended with one demostrator shot to death by the police and by the attempted assasination of fellow radical Rudi Dutschke.  However, soon  the means become the end as far as the RAF was concerned.  They did not seem to have a coherant political philosophy they were trying to advance; blowing up buildings and robbing banks appears to be the RAF's sole purpose. Whatever deeper goal they may have had is not discussed in Mr. Aust's book.

That is the only fault I can find with it and it may be a fault with the RAF rather than with Mr. Aust's account. Mr. Aust covers the history of the Red Army Faction from it's early inception to it's heyday and it's eventual collapse.  The story is as hard to put down as it is to believe.  Today terrorism is thought of exclusively in terms of radical Islam, but in the 1970's it was embraced by western radical groups as well.  The RAF was responsible for multiple bank robberies, several bombings, kidnappings, assasinations  and eventually the hi-jacking of a Luftansa airline.  They worked with the PLO and with the East German Stasi over the course of two decades going through three generations of members. That the RAF became celebrated as radical icons does not speak well for the left.

After arresting the first generation of R.A.F. members, the West German government built a special courthouse just to hold the trials of the  leadership including Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader.  As the U.S. approaches moving terrorist suspects to U.S. prisons in order to put them on trial, we would all do well to consider what happened with the RAF leadership.  Things did not go well during the three-year-long trial.

In the end, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. does not provide the answers I wanted, namely why did they all do it.  In the final analysis, those involved were nothing more than common criminals, spoiled rich kids who used the war in Vietnam as an excuse to wreck havoc on their country.  They would steal a car saying their actions protest a corrupt system, but the car they'd steal could easily be yours or mine and the act of stealing it did nothing to better the lives of anyone in Vietnam.  In retrospect, the RAF members seem to be little more than dupes, easily manipulated into lives of crime by eachother, by Palestinain terrorists, by the East German Stasi.  How anyone could conclude the capitalist system is corrupt and then embrace the government of East Germany as liberating is beyond me.

But it makes for very interesting reading.

As part of the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge I watched the recent German language movie based on Stefan Aust's book.  Like the book, it is fast paced, full of action and suspense and it covers all the main events in the RAF's history which the book covered. 

It's my belief that movies glamourize everthing; they can't help it.  Project anything on a giant screen and it becomes glamourous--there's no way around it.  But the filmmakers stay true enough to the source material so this problem is largely avoided.  I cannot say the same for the trailer.  The trailer, featured below, makes the RAF look like some sort of Robin Hood-like folk heroes, which the movie itself does not do.  If you have to choose one or the other, I'd say read the book.  But if you're curious about the RAF the movie will suffice in a pinch.

This book counts for the We Didn't Start the Fire Challenge as it deals with Berlin and with hi-jacking both of which are mentioned in Billy Joel's song.

The Fight Against Prop. 8 Continues

The trial to overturn Proposition 8 began Monday in San Francisco.  The plaintiff's seek to overturn Proposition 8 which took the freedom to marry away from gay and lesbian people in the state of California.  Proposition 8 was passed by 52% of the voters in November of 2008 on the same ballot that saw the election of Barack Obama. 

A selection from plaintiff's attorney Ted Olsen's opening statement:

During this trial, Plaintiffs and leading experts in the fields of history, psychology, economics and political science will prove three fundamental points:
First – Marriage is vitally important in American society.
 Second – By denying gay men and lesbians the right to marry, Proposition 8 works a grievous harm on the plaintiffs and other gay men and lesbians throughout California, and adds yet another chapter to the long history of discrimination they have suffered.
 Third – Proposition 8 perpetrates this irreparable, immeasurable, discriminatory harm for no good reason.

Thank you, sir.  Well said. 

The entire opening statement can be found at Andrew Sullivan's blog here.  More is sure to follow.

From A to X by John Berger

My On-the-ground-lion,

Did you receive my last parcel? In it I put Marlboros, Zambrano, green mint, coffee.

Opening to the first letter in From A to X by John Berger.

John Berger's Booker nominated novel From A to X is designed to infuriate readers. The man is simply asking for it.

From A to X is an epistolary novel, consisting of letters sent from a woman, A'ida, to Xavier, the imprisoned man she loves. A novel made up of letters loses many readers from the get-go. The introduction explains that the letters in From A to X are not in chronological order, but in the order Xavier had put them in when they were found in his cell. To this the author has added several letters that A'ida wrote but did not send. In between each of A'ida's letters are brief passages, notations, scraps of memoir, that Xavier wrote on the backside of each letter. These are more random musing than narrative. The resulting novel is more puzzle than story; something a small subset of readers will enjoy. From A to X is not a book for the masses.

John Berger makes his reading audience even smaller by the content of his characters. An exchange of love letters between an imprisoned lover and a free one could make for engrossing reading, if the lover is wrongly imprisoned, even if he is rightly imprisoned but made sympathetic by circumstances or by his own remorse. Xavier, deserves to be in prison. He deserves to be there and he is not sorry either. In fact, should he get out of prison, it is clear that he would continue his life of crime. His crime, terrorism.

John Berger asks a lot from his readers. I have to give him credit for this. He is certainly willing to go far outside one's comfort zone.

I have mixed feelings about the results. The passionate love A'ida displays in her letters is as real and as moving as anything you'll find in any novel. Criminal lovers have been a staple of story-telling for some time. They've become a common feature, maybe more of movies than of books. (I suspect it's easier to identify with them over the course of a two hour film than over the length of time spent with a novel, especially if they look as good as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.) But terrorists are still outside the realm of sympathetic characters for most readers. I think we've read enough, seen enough, to understand criminals who kill for money, from jealousy, or to gain position. Terrorist who coldly calculate plans to kill large numbers of innocent people to advance a political position are just not people readers can sympathize with. 

Trying to come to grips with From A to X led me to look at other reviews. I found a rather loving one at The Independant which quoted a passage from the book in its conclusion:

Towards the end of the book, A'ida adopts a cat that gives her great comfort. Meanwhile, a little white kitten drops into the prison exercise yard, where Xavier and his fellow inmates quickly realise that its back is broken. They persuade the guards to take it inside, where the animal turns on her back. "With her two front paws, she wiped her face, beginning with the ears down to the white mouth, over the eyes. She wiped her eyes as if wiping away the illusions of life, and this done, she was dead... She had escaped."

If you find the above passage moving, then From A to X is the book for you. If you found yourself rolling your eyes a little, then you're probably glad From A to X did not make it to the Booker Prize short list.  I'm in the latter camp.  Just how does a little white kitten fall into a prison exercise yard, anyway? 

Short Story Sunday: Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi

The fluted girl huddled in the darkness clutching Stephen's final gift in her hand.

Opening to "The Fluted Girl" by Paulo Bacigalupi.

The future does not look good, not as far as Paulo Bacigalupi sees it.  The ten stories that make up Pump Six present a dystopian vision that should give any reader pause while they entertain.  Entertain they do. 

Mr. Bacigalupi's (sound it out) stories work best when they explore the extreme edge of what it is to be human.  From the moment humans became human we have sought to alter the natural world around us as well as our own bodies, painting ourselves different colors, piercing ourselves to add bits of metal to our bodies.  Today we can have extensive surgeries done to change just about any aspect of our physical body. Tomorrow, genetic alteration?  The same has been done to the natural world.  Our ancestors planted seeds of foods they enjoyed, altered the paths of rivers, leveled hillsides.  We continue to do so while at the same time creating artificial pockets of nature just to keep a little place for vacations.  By the time Mr. Bacigalupi's future arrives, what is human, what is natural, will be as unrecognizable to us as our world would be to our own ancestors.

"The Fluted Girl" along with "The People of Sand and Slag" reviewed here look at the extreme body alteration  our future may hold.  In "The Fluted Girl" a kind of serfdom has taken hold in parts of Asia.  Those in power are able to subject the people they control to just about anything they like.  No one is truly free.  An ageing entertainer plans to make  twin girls stars so she can retire with the money they make.  She has altered the girls, changed their bodies to turn them into living musical instruments.  No longer able even to walk as a human being walks, the fluted girl must decide if she will strike out against her masters or surrender to the future they've provided her and become a star.

In "Yellow Card Man" overpopulation and pollution have devasted the earth, reducing a once powerful shipping magnet to a poor refugee looking for work in Bangkok, where there are thousands of applicants for every job opening.  Thinking he has information about  a job no one else has, he puts on the good suit he has saved for years and heads across town.  Believing the clothes make the man, he hopes the suit will give him the edge he needs to get the job.  But the suit only attracts attention he does not want, attention that will not do him any good. 

The title story "Pump Six" presents civilization that has run down just as humanity has.  Slow poisoning, brought about by generations of contaminated food and drinking water has made humanity incapable of maintaining the machines that keep civilization running.  One man, the one in charge of maintaining the city's sewage pumps, discovers this when pump six stops working, decades past the deadlines for its routine maintanence. 

I've already added "The People of Sand and Slag" to my on-going attempt to reach 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die.  The stories I've described above along with several of the others are at least as good as "The People of Sand and Slag" but I'm going to refrain from adding any to the list as yet.  Unless I get some encouragement in the comments sections; someone to second a recommendation.  But I do think Paolo Bacigalupi is an author to watch.  The future of humanity--lets hope not. The future of science fiction--I hope so.

I'll Be Watching You by Charles de Lint

Sometimes the darkness calls, and I find myself approaching it.

Charles de Lint, Introduction to I'll Be Watching You.

I'll Be Watching You is not a typical Charles de Lint book.  For a couple of months last year, Charles de Lint's name kept popping up all over the book blogs I regularly read, so I ordered what was available over at Paperbackswap.com.  I'll give just about anyone a try if enough people recommend him.  Charles de Lint typically writes urban fantasy, stories set in realistic, modern settings with magical or fantastic elements.  He also writes  more straightforward high fantasy fiction usually with a Celtic background.  He's written over 60 books under his own name and under various psyudonymns. 

I'll Be Watching You is a departure for Mr. de Lint.  It's a crime/thriller.  The heroine, Rachel Sorenson is on her own after leaving her abusive husband.  She is trying to make a new life for herself in the city working as a framer in a small gallery and renewing her interest in becoming an artist.  She does not know that she is being stalked by two men: her ex-husband and by a reclusive photographer who lives in the apartment building across from hers watching her through the telescopic lens of his camera.

I'll Be Watching You works as an entertaining thriller.  Mr. de Lint brings his characters to life enough for the reader to care about what happens to them and creates a plot full of twists that keep the pages turning.  But as I read, I began to develop this nagging suspicion that he was making it all up as he went along.  Too many things just didn't ring true.  In one scene, a friend of Rachel's takes her to a bike shop to purchase a new bike.  She cannot decide between the three speed, five speed and ten speed bicycles.  I've not ridden a bike in ages, but three speeds?   Is there an adult anywhere in North America riding a three speed bicycle?  When I last bought a bike to get around town  25 years ago, the major decision I had to make was mountain bike vs. street bike, not how many speeds the bike would have. Just about every bike in the shop had 20 as I recall.  (Were I putting this information in a novel, I'd do more research.)

A writer of fantasy really can make it all up as he goes along.  That's one reason why people who love fantasy love it--it creates its own rules for its own world.  To depict reality, one must do research.  In I'll Be Watching You Rachel has a difficult relationship with her best friend's boyfriend, an artist with a grudge against gallery owners.  He dispises gallery owners as leeches who skim fifty percent off every sale, depriving artists of what should rightfully be theirs.  It's true that gallery owners take fifty percent of every sale, some even take sixty percent, but every artist I know would happily give up half their sales to have a gallery represent them.  Galleries often buy works of art outright if nothing in a particular show sells just to keep a promising artist going long enough to develop a following.  I currently have several pieces in a gallery which has actually sold one and did take fifty percent of the sale.  Why shouldn't they?  They had to keep it on display  for several months before it sold.  They earned their share.

I think its important to get all of the details right, because the reader must trust the author at some point.  If the details about things the reader knows are correct, then the reader can believe the details about things he does not know.  Like police work for instance.  Since I have no real experience with police work, I've no way of knowing if I'll Be Seeing You accurately depicts it.  I do know that the book isn't exactly accurate when it comes to art galleries or to purchasing bicyles.  This did not make the depiction of police work any easier to believe. 

I do have another Charles de Lint book in my TBR stack and I still intend to read it.  It's a piece of high fantasy--the cover features a monster, an man with a glowing sword and a woman in a white dress.  I'm looking forward to it.  It looks like fun.  I'll Be Seeing You was fun, I just found it a little hard to believe.

Dakota's Favorites: My Antonia by Willa Cather

Dakota's Favorites are reviews selected from my archive.  People who study search engines say that Google prioritizes current posts, so it may be that blog posts over one year old never appear in search engines.  That seems a shame to me.  I know I'm not the only one out there with an archive full of wonderful reviews.  So, every other Friday, I run a review from my archive.  Always a book I highly recommend.


In January of 2008 Dakota ate my copy of My Antonia by Willa Cather.  I ran the post below in memorium. So far, Dakota has not eaten any of my books in 2010.


Dakota has eaten her first book of the year. I left the bookcase uncovered for just a few minutes because, well it's a long dull story. The end result, My Antonia by Willa Cather is now pretty much ready for the worm box, if only I had a worm box.

Fortunately, I have read My Antonia.

Willa Cather is one of the better lesser writers; she really deserves to occupy a much higher position in the literary cannon than she does. My Antonia is considered one of her better novels; I believe she considered it to be her best. It tells the story of several young women who come of age on the Nebraska prairie in the late 19th century. The women are all very strong characters, almost stereotypes, women who live through the hardships and the joys of pioneer era America and all come out pretty well in the end. The book does feature a character that critics say is based on Cather herself, but don't they all.

The novel is a very entertaining read, much to the surprise and delight of my book club who thought it would be something of a slog to get through. Cather's story is compelling; she knows what she is writing about well enough to bring the scene and the characters fully to life. It's a book that will stay with you after you're done, too.

I think many of us in America are as sick of hearing about the people of the great plains as I am after so much coverage of the Iowa caucuses, but once you've recovered consider My Antonia by Willa Cather. I think you'll enjoy it at least as much as Dakota did.

I'm giving My Antonia by Willa Cather five out of five stars, in memorium.