lis.dom

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte — The Ask is supposed to be this hilarious novel about an aging Gen-Xer trying to fight his way back into his disappointing job doing fundraising for a school in Manhattan he calls Mediocre University. The writing is clever, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the place the protagonist lives in college, The House of Drinking and Smoking, but I can’t say I actually enjoyed the book, which seemed to challenge my willing suspension of disbelief without doing enough to reward it.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard — The mystery book discussion book for this month. Everyone else loved it; I was bored to tears by it, although it did help out my insomnia several nights running.

The Mother Knot by Kathryn Harrison — A very slim, nearly throwaway volume by Kathryn Harrison (whom I adore) about coming to terms with her mother. A lot of people looked down on The Kiss as writing-as-therapy, but it’s much too artful a book for that. This one feels a little more like that, but if you like Harrison, it’s worth the hour it’ll take to read it.

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud — This is in some ways two books — a satirical look at the lives of socially privileged not-quite-so-young people in Manhattan in 2001 and a book about 9/11. But the second book wouldn’t exist without the first. The first is hilarious, at least if you like novel of manners sorts of books, but what I particularly liked about the second book was the way it showed how major traumatic events derail everyone’s lives in unexpected ways, and how some of those are ways they can never talk about because the tragedy of them pales next to the tragedy of the main event, and so you are left numb twice over, and you feel worse when everyone assumes your numbness is the same as everyone else’s.

I also read lots of poems, especially by Aliki Barnstone and Robert Pinsky, whom I had the great pleasure of hearing read on April 23.

Half in Love by Linda Gray Sexton — Sexton’s mother was the poet Anne Sexton. The younger Sexton has already written one book about dealing with her mother’s death, so a second might seem unnecessary, but if you are interested in the way that suicide plays itself out in families over time, this is worth a look.

Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer — Half the reviews I’ve read of this call it a yoga memoir and the other half call it a mommy memoir. I might be inclined to call it a recollection of your parents splitting up memoir, if I were to call it anything, but I very much enjoyed it. If you do yoga, you’ll like the funny parts about the sort of ridiculous nature of yoga. If you have kids, I would guess you might enjoy the parts about the inanity of raising kids in a time of über-politically correct parenting. And if you’re interested in the changing demographics of families and how one thoughtful person thinks about them, you will certainly like it.

[reread] The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson — My first selection for our mystery book discussion group. I’m not generally much of a mystery reader, which makes for an interesting time now that I’m in charge of a mystery book discussion. Since I’ve just moved from Wyoming, I thought I’d give the group a little taste of what it’s like there. They seemed to enjoy it.

Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman — This is sort of a book-length response to the people who were trying to flagellate Waldman after her 2005 essay about loving her husband more than her children appeared in the New York Times. It’s occasionally tedious, as collections of essays that end up being a bit repetitive sometimes are, but it’s also hysterically funny. Well. At least it is hysterically funny if, like me, you fall off the sofa when you read “It is kind of remarkable how little housework the men who marched next to me at the Take Back the Night vigils have ended up doing.”

Among Others by Jo Walton — My favorite novel of this year so far. It’s about a fifteen year old girl from Wales who is in boarding school and reads a lot of science fiction and tries to find a karass. Wonderful. I’ve read maybe 10% of the books she talks about, and even that little bit gave me shivers of remembering what reading them was like. If you’ve read more, the effect could only be intensified.

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman — I’ve been wanting to check this out ever since reading about it over at Jenna’s place. Actually, just go read her review, which says pretty much everything I would want to.

Happy Trails to You by Julie Hecht — I picked up The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht at the La Grange Public Library some years back because it had a nice looking cover. I started reading it and was hooked immediately by the voice and later by the story. I’ve been saving her latest collection of stories for just the right occasion, and apparently that occasion was now. The narrator — the same in all her work — is a cranky, misanthropic devotee of Dr. Andrew Weil who is sort of anti-immigration, and yet somehow she still manages to make me want to hang out with her. That seems like an accomplishment in of itself.

[reread] Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones — RIP, Diana Wynn Jones.

It’s odd to me how much news now comes to me via my RSS reader, and how much more quickly I thus learn of things than I might otherwise. Just now I learned from Monica Edinger that Diana Wynne Jones has died. I never got around to writing her a letter to tell her how grateful I am to her work, and thus, as so often happens, I am doing so now, after her death.

What’s funniest in a way is that I’ve actually read very little of her. She was was prolific — books and series and more books and books tangentially related to various series and their worlds — but I have read only a handful of them. But those few are books I have come back to again and again and again.

My grandmother gave me a copy of Charmed Life once when I was sick. I was sick quite a lot as a kid, and I was home by myself all day and would grow terribly bored. Any book that could pull me out of that into another world was a charm indeed, and that book I particularly loved — the setting of the old castle, the jewelry that screamed its enchantment, the sense of trying to shield people from a fate that can’t be denied — it was all wonderful.

A year or so later, my mother and I picked up a copy of Fire and Hemlock from B. Dalton, of all places, which had a huge display of the paperback. It had the most garishly godawful cover — at some point I folded a piece of math homework around it to make a cover for the thing because I was so sick of looking at it. And I looked at it a lot, because I reread this book all the time. I read it every finals week during junior high, and those are perhaps my clearest and best memories of times with it. I was the in the midst of the ages that Polly is in the book then, and I was living in a place I hated, and the people I liked best in the world were musicians, as the other most important character in the book is. And I loved my grandmother more than almost anyone else in the world, and I loved the grandmother in the book, too.

It’s a retelling of Tam Lin (and oh how I love retellings of Tam Lin), and it is about magic and friendship and love and good and evil and spells. It’s got a lot going for it, then, if you like that sort of thing. But the scene I always looked forward to the most, and that I still replay in my head from time to time, is one where Polly is lost in the streets of Bristol, having been dropped off at the train station by her father, who hasn’t bothered to see if she has money for a ticket home. She has, perhaps magically, been drawn to a building where a quartet is rehearsing — her friend Thomas Lynn, and the three other members, and they take her in and give her food and coffee and then, apologetically, go on with their rehearsal, but they don’t need to apologize, because really it is a private concert, just for her.

“If you could hear lime juice, it would sound like violins,” Polly thinks. I can see that basement as surely as if I’d been there, and I go there in memory the way I go to places I’ve really been. But of course I have really been there: that is what books do. And I will remain grateful to Diana Wynne Jones for providing me with such a place for as long as I live.

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos — This is this year’s selection for All Iowa Reads, and so I’ll be doing a book discussion for it sometime later this year. It’s a very book-discussiony book (albeit a long one), full of family issues and small town issues and social issues and that sort of thing. Between the length and the number of issues, it almost seemed like there was almost too much, as if the novel were both crammed full and sprawling. But the characters are wonderful, and having recently moved from a town of 351 people, I loved how well Kallos got small towns and how they are both very private and not private at all.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley — This was the choice for this month’s mystery book discussion at the library. There is almost nothing to discuss in Bradley’s very sweet, very enjoyable tale about an 11 year old girl who is an aspiring chemist and accidental sleuth in rural England in 1950, but we managed to eke some conversation out of the setting and the degree to which a willing suspension of disbelief was required.

[listen] The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison — I’m doing my best to use our library’s downloadable eaudiobooks. Since I’m a Mac user with an older iPod Touch and since Overdrive only lets one person check out a digital file at a time, my selection is generally somewhat limited (I don’t listen to books enough to make placing holds practical). I was quite pleased with this selection. There are two narrators (done in slightly different voices by the same woman on the audio version), Stella, a woman in her twenties who is lost in a sort of twentysomething Manhattanite way, and Tillie, her aunt, who is lost in an alcoholic living in a trailer park in the desert kind of way. The novel deals with how they come to learn of each other’s existence. It is not a happy story, but it is a good one.

The Neighbors are Watching by Debra Ginsberg — There ain’t no fun like making fun of suburbanites, so if you like that sort of thing, you will probably like this book about how a suburban San Diego neighborhood is sent into a tizzy when the pregnant daughter of one of its residents shows up on his doorstep and is greeted by his wife, who had no idea he even had a daughter.

Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music by David N. Meyer — I have loved biographies of rock stars ever since the day I happened upon the 781s at the Iowa City Public Library as a high school freshman. This one is my favorite kind — long, overwrought, filled with music trivia, drenched in more music knowledge and snobbery than the clerks in High Fidelity (I mean, this author hates the Eagles, hates them*), and incredibly snarky. Of course, since it’s about Gram Parsons, it’s also incredibly sad or completely overwrought, depending on your feelings about musicians who die of drug overdoses in general and Parsons in particular. I’m a fan, so I liked it.

How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward — I picked this up off a donation pile sitting in my office one day when I had forgotten my book. It was blurbed by someone as being “like The Lovely Bones,” which I guess it is in that it involves the disappearance of a young girl from a suburban home. I guess they also both require some willing suspension of disbelief — but accepting that a dead girl is narrating a story makes for a riveting and interesting book in Sebold’s case, whereas accepting the broad series of contrived coincidences just makes for annoyance on this reader’s part in Ward’s. Oh well. I did finish it, but I don’t recommend it.

Daughter’s Keeper by Ayelet Waldman — I love a book where the Amazon reviews ricochet back and forth between “best writing I’ve ever read” and “can’t write her way out of a slush pile.” I think neither of these things. It’s very clearly a first (literary) novel sort of a novel, but I admire a book that manages to portray a naive young political activist in a way I don’t find totally offensive. Said young activist comes back from Mexico and goes to live among the poor in Oakland, and then the guy she’d been seeing in Mexico shows up on her doorstep, so she takes him in. Of course, he is an illegal alien and thus can’t get much in the way of work, and thus he gets involved in a drug deal in which he gets her marginally involved, too, and then the forces of law and order sweep in and everyone gets caught up in the travesties of mandatory minimums for drug sentencing. It’s a novel about a white girl, and thus it is a little bit the Hallmark version of mandatory minimums. In that regard, I look forward to reading Orange is the New Black, which sounds like it might be similar.

* “The Eagles were and remain the most consistently contemptible stadium band in rock. Gram famously referred to their music as ‘a plastic dry-fuck.’ He bore the Eagles a special loathing, as any sane listener might.” p. 366

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson — Our library sponsors a mystery book discussion group, and January’s selection was actually all the Stieg Larsson novels and/or movies — read or watch whatever you want and come discuss. I worked my way through the whole trilogy over the course of the month because, if nothing else, they are compelling, and I am just as bad as the rest of the world when it comes to wanting to know what happens next when a main character has a bullet in the head. It’s also nice to read a thriller with committed leftwingers in it, although like Melanie Newman, I have some discomfort with the discrepancy between Larsson’s professed feminism and the way he writes about women.

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert — Two of my best and oldest friends are getting married. I am a marriage skeptic, and I’d heard good things about this book from other marriage skeptics, so I thought I’d check it out. Gilbert is a breezy and entertaining sort of writer, and she is pleasantly skeptical about the institution, but I was left largely underwhelmed by her sort of slapdash anthropology.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

We All Fall Down by Nic Sheff — I am amused to no end that WorldCat has the following subject headings for this book: Biography : Fiction : Juvenile audience. I read this via NetGalley (thanks, Michelle!) on the library’s Sony eReader. It’s the first time I’ve ever read an entire book in a digital format, and it worked well enough for this book, which is full of very short sentences and white space and is your basic addiction memoir narrative.

[listen] Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon — This is a novel about identity and identity theft that I ordered for my old library but hadn’t gotten around to reading. I was playing around with downloadable audio at my new library and discovered it was available that way, and, through some set of miracles, I even got it to play on my iPod. It’s an addictive and creepy story with lots of different characters who seem to be totally disconnected to each other but who eventually meet up, which I always love.

There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From by Charles Bryan — Bryan is a struggling writer dude who moves to New York City in 1998 and ends up getting a job on Wall Street writing marketing copy for an investment bank. This is as soul-crushing and awful as you might imagine, and it becomes all the more so when he’s at work on September 11, 2001. Bryan’s a fan of minimalism, and it shows in his prose. It works well for the story he tells.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson