Book: The Dinner

There is a reason that both the front and the back cover of my paperback copy of The Dinner contain references to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Herman Koch's novel reads like a blend between Flynn's 2012 best seller and Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, with a little bit of foodie-ism thrown in for good measure. It's eminently readable--I read the whole thing on a flight from Salt Lake City to Atlanta--but that's not to say I entirely liked it.

In fact, I'm not sure what to make of it. Koch--like many modern authors--isn't particularly interested in creating characters that are likable or relatable, and his narrator Paul Lohman becomes increasingly off-putting and unreliable as the novel progresses. Though that creates some interesting plot twists, it at times is infuriating. In fact, I'm glad my wife was sitting next to me on the airplane, because I know I groaned aloud at a few points. Paul's narration becomes increasingly skewed as the novel progresses, and at first what seems to be slightly rude behavior soon becomes both explainable and horrible. 

At the heart of the novel are the questions of what it means to be a parent and what it means to protect one's children, since this dinner between the four main characters is to talk about a central act committed by their children. As a teacher I have seen parents lie, cheat, and steal for their children (though by no means is that all parents, just a small minority) and so many of the conversations between Paul, his wife, and his brother and sister-in-law were frighteningly believable. Unfortunately, not every twist in the book was as believable, and though it was silly at times it was still quite a page turner.

Grade: B-

Book: The Rook

The Rook hits a really great sweet spot between entertainment and espionage with a fair dose of comedy thrown in as well, and if I didn't always like the structure of the novel, author Daniel O'Malley more than makes up for it with his boundless creativity and originality. 

The Rook's cover bears the terrible phrasing "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," and while that may be a convenient shorthand for the work of the government agency featured in the novel, fortunately that kind of awkward punning is not really representative of the novel as a whole. O'Malley tests the boundaries of patience with some of the names (the Chequey--pronounced "Sheck-Ay"--is the official name of the agency, while our heroine's name is Myfanwy--rhymes with Tiffany) but he is quick to find other ways to flesh out his world in more interesting ways. The Chequey has a long history in England, and that history allows O'Malley to make references to odd, hilarious, and terrifying plots from the institution's past. He doles out these anecdotes little by little, and by novel's end I think he had created a world nearly as well-developed as J.K. Rowling's.

Unfortunately one of the ways he does so (and really my only knock against the novel) is through huge info-dumps in the form of letters from one character to, well, herself. Because Myfanwy opens the novel with amnesia, and her former self had been warned and prepared for this outcome by writing her a whole series of letters about her life and history. It's a little too convenient, and though often the letters really do just flesh out the world, at a certain point it just becomes a bit much. Plus, though O'Malley obviously does, I don't really find the old Myfanwy as interesting as the new one, so I wasn't as keen to get back into her head space.

Still, the novel is absolutely fun enough that I'm willing to look the other way on the letters. The world Myfanwy inhabits isn't exactly magical--though some seemingly magic things, like the psychic warnings of her amnesia--seem to take place. It's more like a weird version of the X-Men, where the non-normal members of the Chequey all seem to possess some sort of weird and inexplicable power. It might be talking to trees, or seeping gases from your skin, or possessing a tentacle arm, or, in the case of Myfanwy, the ability to manipulate the systems and bodies of others. (As a side bonus, Myfanwy apparently also has the ability to be a really good and efficient government administrator). The agency is thus filled with quirky individuals from a vampire to a single individual with four bodies to a woman who can infiltrate (and influence) dreams. The whole Chequey is fascinating and fun, and I can't wait for another O'Malley novel (apparently he is already well underway with book 2 in what I can only hope will eventually be a series). He left plenty of threads tied off but not tied up (for example, who is Bronwyn's mysterious brother) that I think there will be a lot of room for development and character growth, in addition to the crazy world he's created.

I'm not sure who exactly to recommend this book to yet, but it was one of the most fun books I've read all year, so if X-Men meets spy games meets office politics meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer sounds like your kind of thing, well, it's a lot of fun.

Grade: A

Book: Night Film

Night Film is the kind of book I wish I could write, not because it's the greatest thing I've ever read--I've got a few issues both with Pessl's style (who uses that many italics for no particular reason?) and with the content of the novel (at times McGrath is such an idiot as a narrator that I can't tell if it's bad writing or just a particular way of playing up a character's shortcomings). Rather, I fell for the book from the moment I read its jacket because it seems to create such a nice blend of so many of my favorite things: film, literary fiction, horror, noir, and more. Pessl has a ton of fun throwing everything at the wall and allowing us--and McGrath--to decide what is going to stick: is this a ghost story? A tale of witchcraft? Devil worship? Abuse? Something else entirely? It's not clear, until it is, and then it isn't again, which is a pretty great trick to pull off.

As I said, that doesn't make it perfect. I'm not sure I ever like McGrath--his motivations are always selfishly myopic (especially for someone who was as successful as a reporter as Pessl makes him), and his sidekicks are obtuse and obnoxious and a little bit too quirky to feel real. The story itself veers into camp a few times and loses the nice sense of suspense she builds for most of the novel.

For me, however, those types of minor issues are easily outweighed by the pleasure I got from reading the book. Pessl makes the book unusually multimedia heavy (you can even download an app and use it to enhance various parts of the novel, though I didn't do that myself), featuring magazine articles and covers, web pages, newspaper clippings, and more throughout the text. Though those elements didn't always feel natural, it wasn't nearly as awkward as, say, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children's use of photographs; instead it enriched the text and made it feel more like pieces of a life, which seems to be exactly what she was going for. 

Most impressively, I think Pessl does a pretty fine job creating a sense of foreboding and dread. Her reclusive filmmaker, Stanislas Cordova, is always hovering on the edges of the text, never quite clear in terms of purpose or role or goals, always changing from one thing to another (reclusive genius? evil madman? loving father? satanic murderer?), and so the inability to draw a definite outline around him makes him a figure of fear, a bogeyman who is never quite seen except out of the corner of your eye. It really works, as do her descriptions of his films. They come across as a product of some kind of Polanski/Kubrick/Lynch blend that plums the darkest parts of our hearts and so hints at some darkness in the filmmaker's own life. I couldn't help but thinking of films like Repulsion where that line between sanity and insanity seems to increasingly blur, and even without showing us a lot of blood or guts we can be horrified and frightened. Cordova's films seem to function in a similar way.

I don't think it's the best book of the year--I haven't read enough from the year to make that proclamation, but even if I had there are enough rough patches here to make me question it from a literary standpoint. But it is still one of my favorite reads of the year. A great book to read next to a dark window on a cold night.

Book: Ghost Story

Well this was a disappointment.

Horror lit is one of my favorite genres (I know, I'm a man of low class tastes), and when I perused Flavorwire's 50 Scariest Books of All Time list I was sure I would get some good suggestions. I'd already read 19 of the suggestions, andI don't like gore, really, or descriptions of torture, so some of the books didn't strike my fancy. But ghost stories? Stories of the supernatural? That's right down my strike zone. For that reason,I was pretty excited about the 4th recommendation on the list: Peter Straub's Ghost Story, a 1979 novel about a group of old men who may have brought their worst fears into existence.

That sounds like a pretty good kernel for a novel, and there were a few passages that really were gripping and compelling--Sears' story of Fenny and Gregory, for example, was grim and oppressive, an echo of The Turn of the Screw that really worked. Don's story of his mysterious love affair with Alma was also not bad.

Overall, though? This was incredibly dull. The characters were one-dimensional, the dialogue sounded false on almost every note, and it just wasn't as scary as I was expecting. Or at all, really, other than the two exceptions above. I had to force myself to get through it so that I could move onto something more interesting. 

Part of the problem is that I don't feel like Straub had a handle on his narrative structure. We had a weird omniscient narrator--or maybe limited omniscient?--that bounced from character to character and made them fairly indistinguishable from one another. Structurally we moved back and forward in time as well, but not in a particularly compelling fashion. Straub comes off here like a second rate Stephen King, which is ironic, because their collaboration The Talisman was pretty good, and I know Stephen King is a big fan of this novel as well.

For me, however, there wasn't a lot of there there, and this may end up as my most anticlimactic read of 2013 after my initial excitement of ordering it. When pressing the "Checkout" button on Amazon is the best part of the reading experience, however, I can't help but feel let down.

Grade: D

Book: The Cellist of Sarajevo

I learned about The Cellist of Sarajevo this summer during an AP workshop as I was looking to expand my repertoire of authors to use in my World Literature class. Canadian Steven Galloway's novel dealing with the siege of Sarajevo seemed like an interesting candidate, what with its multiple perspectives and fascinating central conceit: a mortar destroys a marketplace, killing twenty-two people. In mourning for them, and because he does not know what else to do, a cellist plays Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor on the bombsite everyday for twenty-two days. Remarkably, this story is based on real Sarajevo Philharmonic cellist Vedran Smailovic, who really did play his cello in the ruins of Sarajevo (though according to Wikipedia, he is not too happy with the book's borrowing of his story, even though the author fictionalized much of it).

He doesn't have too much to worry about, though, as Smailovic is really not the focus of the book. Instead, the book alternates between the stories of three characters: Kenan, a man attempting to get water for his family and an elderly neighbor; Dragan, another man walking through the city in search of bread and food; and Arrow, a sniper attempting first to strike terror into the hearts of the "men in the hills" who are besieging the city, and then to protect the cellist as he increasingly becomes a symbol of hope and resistance. 

This is a great book club book--in fact, I recommended it to my mother for her book club, and I think it would go over quite well. It's sentimental, well-intentioned, and overall uplifting in a "keep-hope-alive-even-when-it's-hopeless" type of way. Unfortunately, it never captured me like I hoped it would, and it's seeming complexity turns out to be a little superficial. The problem, I think, likes in the fact that Kenan and Dragan are virtually identical as characters, and both of them are far less interesting than Arrow. Partly it's because Arrow has something unique to do, while the other two seem to be on basically the exact same quest (just with different goals). I cannot understand why Galloway didn't change one of the two to provide a different perspective on the seige--a child, perhaps, or an older woman. Because the two seemed so similar, I lost track of who was who, which one had which backstory, and where they were in relation to each other. The chronology of the book also seemed a little strange to me, but that might just be because I wasn't paying attention.

That's not to say it's a bad book. At just 235 small and well-spaced pages, the novel is a very quick read, and as I said, it has a hopeful optimism to it that is encouraging. I enjoyed it all right, I just had expected to be more moved, impressed, and taken with it. 

It does make me want to seek out more novels set in the Bosnian conflict or the seige of Sarajevo. It's a chapter of history I know very little about, even though it was happening right while I was in high school. So if nothing else, I appreciate that Galloway's book is keeping such an incredible chapter of history from being forgotten. I guess that's what the cellist was trying to do as well. 

Grade: C

Book: Stardust

I try not to allow Neil Gaiman's personal whiffs (Amanda Palmer, ugh)  to interfere with how much I love his writing.

Because holy cow I do love his writing!

American Gods and Anansi Boys remain two of my favorite contemporary fantasy novels, but Stardust may now join them on the "Gaiman books I love" list. I'm a sucker for the "dark fairy tale meets everyday youth" genre--like John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things, for example--and Stardust is an excellent addition to the list. Set in the mid nineteenth century, the tale of Tristan Thorn, a young man who leaves his hometown of Wall and passes into the land of Faerie to retrieve a fallen star for the woman he loves, is exactly the kind of story I think I would read aloud to my children (though there is, I believe, one word that might need censoring for the young) if I had them. It's got villains who are scary, but not nightmare inducing, heroes who are common, and therefore somewhat relatable, and both male and female characters worth looking up to. If nothing else, it's the kind of book I can imagine reading aloud with my wife, because we do that sort of thing sometimes.

Stardust is a sort of sweet and slightly more modern version of something like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan, and I think that's exactly what Gaiman is going for. It's funny, it's full of magic, it's heartfelt. It may not have the dark edge that Gaiman's more adult work has, but that's not really the point. It's a love story, at its heart, but it has the same sort of cleverness that Gaiman is known for. It's a frothy bit of nothing that feels like an old friend by the time you close its cover.

And that's a pretty great accomplishment.

Grade: A-

Book: The Natural

I'll admit up front that part of my problem with The Natural is that the movie casts a long shadow. For those who encountered and fell in love with the book first, I can see why the movie would be absolutely infuriating. Major (and I mean MAJOR) differences in both Roy's character and the novel's plot--including a complete 180 on the climax--turn them into wholly different animals with little more than shared DNA: a talented kid, a tragic shooting, an old rookie, a struggling team, a girl named Memo. Reading the novel after my familiarity with the film felt like stepping into an alternate reality.

But credit where credit is due, Malamud's world is as fully fleshed and full of iconography as anything in the film. It just also happens to be a darker, sadder place, full of disappointed heroes and missed opportunities. Roy Hobbes is a harder to character to like here than in the movies. He is both more Godlike in his prowess and more frail in his weaknesses, and thus somehow harder to connect to than a Sandy Koufax pitch. I wanted to like him, but I also wanted him to be better, and that's part of the genius of the story. As the novel progresses, we become like the boy Roy encounters on the final page, pleading "Say it ain't so, Roy," even as we see him stumble and fall to his knees. He may be a natural, Malamud tells us, but he is also fallible, and sometimes we, like Roy, wait too long to make up for past sins.

Is this a Greek myth? A classic tragedy? A biblical allegory? It's all of those things, and it's the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson, and it's a crackling 30s noir, and its about America's fall from grace. It is whip-smart writing, full of the lingo of the baseball diamond and the chalk and dirt of legends. It's good. It really is. It's just . . .

It's just that I love the movie, for all its cheese and schmaltz. Despite the facts that it goes for the syrupy sugar when the novel goes for the jugular. Despite the fact that it's clearly dumbing down the complexity of Malamud's novel. Despite the fact that it doesn't want to question our myth-making so much as codify it. Despite all that, I look back on the movie the same way that Redford and Levinson seem to be looking back on the golden age of baseball itself--with rose colored glasses that somehow seem able to forgive a lot of obvious flaws. It reminds me of being a kid, and of my brother, and of being filled with hope. And it reminds me of the present, and showing it to film students and seeing them jump when Harriet Bird fires that gun, and of getting a little misty-eyed when those lights get blown apart. 

So even if the novel came first, it feels a little like it's kicking at a piece of my personality that is good and optimistic and full of life. So I can respect the book, but at least for now, I can's say I love it. Icons and heroes fall--I know they do--and yet I don't have to love it when they do.

Sorry, Judge, but I still believe in the goodness of man. I can respect the tragedy here. But I can't love it.

Grade: B

Book: Lexicon

I feel somehow wrong giving a so-so review to a book that I enjoyed and read really quickly, but part of me wishes there was just a little more "oomph" to this book. Barry does a nice job with the structure, giving us pieces that fit together more and more clearly over time (though some of the twists are easy to guess, I was genuinely surprised more than once in the book) and flesh out the world of the Poets in some really nice ways.

But honestly, there should have been more. What's here feels like a less developed version of what Neal Stephenson does in Snow Crash, what with the "the secret history of words is that they control reality" thing. In the case of Lexicon, Barry gives us a universe in which the art of persuasion can be wielded like a weapon--and is, by shadowy government spooks known as Poets. When one of them discovers a word that literally has the power to kill everyone in a small Australian town, it's up to a Last Good Man archetypal figure (here known as Eliot, as all Poets are codenamed for famous writers) to figure out how to stop the word from spreading any further. 

It's a neat set-up, and Barry gives us infuriatingly short glimpses of this shadowy rhetorical world in which the Poets operate, but he's so intent on giving us good action scenes (and they are good) that I felt like the richer linguistic world got overlooked. I want to know more about this organization and what they do, but apparently hints and intimations are all Barry wants to give us. That's ok, it's just not as rich as it could have been. And when he gets into the history of "Babel events" and all that kind of stuff, I would have loved a little more complexity. Make me struggle to keep up, don't just tell me, "Yep, words can be really convincing." Because duh.

But still, Lexicon is fun. A bibliophile palate cleanser that would make a good action movie of the Philip K. Dick variety--the kind where you have to just let yourself go with the rules of the world and not think about how silly the premise actually is. In fact, I could see a pretty good role for Michael Fassbender as Eliot.

But I digress.

Good fun, overall. Just don't expect much more.

Grade: B+

Book: Linchpin

Am I alone in thinking that every motivational work book could pretty much be summarized in two or three paragraphs? It's not that I don't enjoy them, because the style of this sort of self-help book tends to be very conversational and with lots of entertaining (or semi-entertaining) examples. But most of the time it seems like the author has about a handful of ideas designed to make you rethink your approach to your job/life/etc. and then spends two hundred plus pages belaboring the point. It's why, though these books are easy to read, I never get particularly excited about reading them.

That said, in Linchpin author Seth Godin did make some great suggestions that have encouraged me to shift the way I think about my career. In essence, Godin suggests that the real key to success, career satisfaction, and (though he downplays it) profit is to make yourself an indispensable part of your organization, to figure out what "art" you have to offer the world/your company/your clients/etc. and then not be afraid to go "off script" and make human connections doing so. He talks about getting out of the mindset that all work is about exchange (I do a service, you pay me) and being taken care of and should be about giving gifts and blazing trails. It's all very shiny, happy, "let's hold hands and sing songs and realize how special you can be if you'll get out of your comfort zone," and some of his advice is still a little pie-in-the-sky (e.g., the best linchpins don't need resumes because their work and what they've accomplished is their resume--they don't fit in as an easily replaceable cog, so why would they apply for the same jobs that everyone else with a resume does), but I like rethinking my job as a teacher as art, and I like rethinking how I teach. 

I got an email this week from a former student who was amazed and thought I would need to know that he got his first college essay assignment and that the teacher said they didn't want a standard five-paragraph essay. This was a student who I had repeated conversations with about understanding the form and organization and why it mattered. I wrote him back to tell him that--shocker--I agreed with his teacher. The five-paragraph essay is boring, it's flat, and any "formula" for good writing eventually grows stale and, well, formulaic. But the basics of learning how to write a five paragraph essay (what I had hoped I was teaching him) give you the groundwork to explode the formula. Once you know how to organize and clarify your thoughts, you can go a million different directions with them. Yes, I also stopped (for the most part) writing five paragraph essays after high school. But that's because I knew how to structure my thoughts in ways that were (for the most part, I hope) clear and understandable. Once you can do that, then it doesn't matte whether you're writing one paragraph or a thirty-page essay. The form provides a base, but the art comes from the ideas and insights that the form helps you to make clear.

I wonder if I'm teaching my students that enough. I don't want my students to all produce the same end product. I want them to discover their own voices and ideas. Every essay, even with tenth graders, I try to tell them that there's not a "right" essay that I'm looking for. There's not a single answer to an essay prompt, there are many. It's taking their unique insights, supporting them, and presenting them in a clear, meaningful, and convincing manner. I think that's what Godin's getting at. Quit thinking that you have to be the same kind of teacher (or web designer, banker, etc.) as everyone else, and figure out what you have to bring to the table that's unique. That's your art, and that's what you can nurture and develop and share with the world. Doing so turns you from a cog into a linchpin--and what do you know, it makes your job more enjoyable as well.

That's not a bad message. It's one that has had me reconsidering how I approach my subject and what it is I want my students to walk away from my classes thinking, feeling, and understanding. It's got me thinking about what unique abilities I have as a teacher that I can bring to bear more fruitfully--things like patience, and my sense of humor, and my expectations, and my tech savvy-ness, and so on and so forth. So I guess, for all the fluff, I like what Godin's saying here. (And what do you know, I explained it in five paragraphs after all.)

Grade: B

Book: Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Blogger (or Bloggess, I guess is her Internet appellation) Jenny Lawson is undoubtedly funny. She has the ability to take any normal story to an 11, and often in unexpected ways. She's like Dave Sedaris but a little more offensive and with less attention to detail, less of a filter, and less philosophical insight. I tore through her book in a matter of days, and though her childhood is neither as terrible or as disturbing as she claims, and though her ability to make any situation awkward and light mental imbalances may be at times cringe-inducing, it is all also pretty funny.

But also exhausting. I have to imagine spending extended time with Jenny, if she's anything like her writing voice, would try anyone's patience after a while. There's great humor, but also who wants to always be at 11 all the time? 

Still, that's a minor complaint, and if I got a little tired of her constant mountain-out-of-molehill-making, I still really enjoyed the read. She thinks differently than most people, and that ability to see things from a skewed perspective means that I never knew where her stories and her head were going to take her, even if her life itself (this being a memoir and all) didn't go anywhere particularly exciting. She's still a satisfying bit of good cheer, and if the writing may get a little redundant, it also had me laughing out loud repeatedly. (Seriously. People were looking at me funny at the gym.) And that, at the start of the school year, is just what I needed.  

Grade: B

Book: American Born Chinese

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a light bite of Asian American identity lit, with a few solid ideas, an engaging illustration style, and a nice interweaving of three stories. I enjoyed it, and it certainly doesn't take long to read or process, but I'm not sure it quite lives up to all the hype. While it's awesome to see the graphic novel expand into new domains, and while I could easily see putting this on a middle or high school reading list, I didn't find it as rich as something like Persepolis, which gives a much more nuanced look at cultural identity and cultural conflict. Granted, that novel is dealing with a "modern" identity in an increasing backwards-looking Iran, while ABC is interested in how Asian and white American identities go together (as well as a stop-the-self-hatred/be-yourself sort of theme that's so common in YA lit), so it's not exactly parallel, but given the two I think Perspolis just has more to say and says it more interestingly.

I'd like to see Yang pursue a longer work, and I'd like to see a little more complexity in how he approaches the issues he's interested in, but that's not to say I didn't like the book. I did, it just didn't stick with me as much as I'd hoped it would. I'd rather go back to something like No-No Boy or Bone for a richer exploration of how second generation Asian Americans deal with the question of identity, but either way I'd still recommend this, especially to younger readers (note: I saw another reviewer commented on the racy themes in the book, and I might just be desensitized and/or have forgotten in the week since I finished, but I don't remember that at all. There's a couple of mentions of breasts, but I think that's about it. I could be wrong though. So, I guess maybe review it before you give it to a middle-schooler. Totally high school appropriate though).

Grade: C+

Book: Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones works on many levels as a contemporary answer to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Ward shouldn't be seen as just an imitator, and she doesn't have her sights set on creating a dialogue with African American literature alone. Medea and mythology, the Bible and hip-hop--all of them run through the book like currents of water. She writes with a poetry that startles, slapping you across the face with metaphors and imagery that embeds itself in your soul. The final third of the book is harrowing, as hurricane Katrina--which has been alluded to all through the book (and is discussed on the book's jacket, so this isn't a spoiler) finally arrives, and Ward doesn't coddle her characters, even as she leaves a space for hope. It's compelling stuff, and it's a reminder of how much good writing is still going in literature today.

It's a rough book--sexually explicit at times, heart-breaking at times, violent at times--and one I could see causing trouble among more conservative readers. But Ward gives us such a fragile and rich character in her narrator Esch that the sharp edges were totally worth it. This is a girl who loves and wants to be loved, that is bound to her flawed and hardscrabble family with bonds deep enough to cut. I loved the way Esch saw the world, even when it broke my heart.

At its heart, it's a novel about motherhood, in all its forms: absent, present, soft, hard, tender, violent, protective, independent, and so on and so forth. Ward's characters interact in so many different ways, but underneath many of these interactions are peaks and valleys that their mothers left in them. I like that concept, and a second reading I think would bring out even more fruitful material, but I had to tear through the book faster than I wanted due to school starting.

Still, this is good stuff. I think it could have some life in it beyond the typical span for contemporary fiction. I look forward to Ward's next book.

Grade: A-

Book: The Bloody Red Baron

The second book in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series, The Bloody Red Baron, does not have quite the complexity or depth of the first book, nor does it have character development that extends quite so deeply. And I can't speak for everyone, but for me Kate Reed is not quite as interesting a character as Genevieve Dieudonne from the first novel.

That said, the story is pretty fun (think about Batman's nemesis "Man-Bat" and you have a rough idea where we're going here), the writing is still sharp, and the world continues to fascinate.

Of course, the real fun of Newman's novels are in picking out the cameos by both fictional and historic figures. In that sense The Bloody Red Baron does not disappoint, and I found my recent forays into silent movies continuing to pay off (Rotwang! From Metropolis!). Heck, even Snoopy made an appearance here, and I was thrown back to elementary school days practicing "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" on the piano. Fond memories.

I will say that something about these books always feels a little off to me, but I can't tell if it's because I'm having so much fun playing spot-the-character that I skim over the plot a little too much, or if it's that Newman's world (with all the spycraft and plot devices) falls short on real characterization. Regardless, something's just a little off for me to really love these books.

Still, I can like them a lot without loving them, and I still plan to continue the series. It's still too much fun to ignore.

Grade: B-

Book: Anna Karenina

I struggle to critique a book like Anna Karenina because I don't feel like I have much of anything to add to the conversation. Is the book a fascinating (if soap opera-esque) exploration of the psychology of love and relationships, the role of faith and morality in life, the synthetic culture of "high society" contrasted with the attempt at authenticity in a rural life? Yes, it's all of that? Does it get too bogged down in Russian agricultural practices, political conflicts, and that kind of stuff? Well, a little (at least when I'm attempting to read it fairly quickly; I'm sure there's lots of great symbolism to explore if I had a greater understanding of Russian history). But that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating look into marriage and relationships--and the myriad ways we can undermine or sabotage them.

The novel examines the interconnections, relationships, and loves between seven people who pair off in a variety of ways--friends, in laws, married couples, courting couples, extramarital couples, etc.--which gives Tolstoy ample room to explore a variety of attitudes towards love and marriage. Some of the characters view those two concepts as inseparably connected, while others see them as discrete concerns. It is this multitude of relationships and perspectives that allows the book to feel so rich and multifaceted. Even when two characters have a fight, Tolstoy will often devote a chapter to each character's point of view. That he can do so with so much empathy and clarity--even when one would suspect he disagrees with the characters' views--is part of what brings the book to life. He also follows these characters for an etended period of time, so we see them all grow (or at least change) over time. Kitty stands out to me as a particularly strong example, going from naive and coquettish flirt who could have her pick of the men to heartbroken girl who imagines her life as a spinster to mature and married wife and mother. Because Tolstoy gives us so much depth with each character, these developments feel earned and worthwhile. While several characters meet tragic fates, the novel also provides a measure of hope in the human ability to love and to connect. I like that.

Unfortunately, there were just sections that dragged as well. Sometimes the level of detail Tolstoy provides really enriches the story (Kitty's marriage, for example, was detailed and comical, but it still managed to be meaningful and sweet as well) but at other times it drags. I really do think I see part of what Tolstoy's doing with Levin repeatedly contemplating the merits of an agricultural lifestyle, but I'm not sure every passage of comparing farm practices is wholly necessary--at least to my ADD-infected 21st century mind. Still, by going onto the tangents and details he does, Tolstoy really does provide a panoramic picture of 1875ish Russian life, in all its variety. Such elaboration does provide plenty of food for thought.

Of the eponymous character, I have mixed feelings. Anna is certainly complex and multifaceted, but (as I think Tolstoy intended) my patience with her wears thin as the novel goes on. Her increasing selfishness and egotism do make her harder to empathize with. But Tolstoy does not leave her out in the cold completely, and he does show the value of finding real love, even as he doesn't shy away from the potential cost of such a selfish pursuit.

Because I think that's one of Tolstoy's themes here--that love is inherently selfish, and the only way we can prevent it from destroying us is by reining in such selfish tendencies and see a deeper level of love that can be selfless.

I mean, that's just one idea. But there are so many themes it would be silly to try and elaborate them here. I enjoyed Anna Karenina more than I expected, though it's still far behind Moby Dick for best of the year. A fascinating--if at times exhausting--read.

Grade: B+

Book: Joyland

Stephen King is hit and miss for me. At times he's fantastic (11/22/63, The Shining, The Stand, etc.), at other times I don't know what he's doing, and he always struggles to maintain the last 100 pages or so. Fortunately, that's not the case here.

Joyland is not his finest effort, but it is an engaging little story, a little bit like a ghost story version of Adventureland. I think it's a lot more focused on character development than the haunting story, and ultimately is more interested in how the past and our histories shape and affect us a lot more than it is about the supernatural. The haunting and other fantasy elements are really just window dressing. That's a strength, because King lets himself and his characters enjoy this themepark world, the joy of discovering a talent, and that moment where you start to transition from youth to adulthood. He writes about those messy transitional ideas like a first love, a first loss, a first seduction. I think he likes these characters, and that's kind of nice given his ability at times to put his characters through torture. Like a lot of King books, it includes a few standard King plot points (telepathic kid being the biggest) which keep it from feeling fully fresh, but that doesn't stop it from being fun.

I listened to this one as an audiobook, and Michael Kelly's narration was really great. Ultimately this is a pretty bit of fluff, but sometimes that's exactly what you're looking for: the perfect book for a car trip.

Grade: B

Book: The Twelve

I have to admit I'm a big fan of Justin Cronin's apocalyptic vampire trilogy, and though this second volume took me a lot longer to get into than the first (The Passage), it still kept me hooked. Cronin is not afraid of harming, even killing, major characters, and as the division between good and bad becomes less black and white in this novel, it is clear that anything could happen to anyone. That uncertainty creates a feeling of dread in the reader that parallels the dread the characters in the book, and it's certainly effective.

However, reading this series as it is released makes me wonder if trilogies should only be published when all three are finished. I know that's silly, because what publisher would invest the money? And I know literature has a long history of stories by installment. But Cronin's world is complex enough--featuring characters from at least two different time periods, and several different locations--that it's easy to forget who is who and what is what in the years between the books' release dates. I found a website to help me bone up on the plot of The Passage before starting The Twelve, and it's a good thing I did. Cronin has a cool little device where he retells the events of the first book in the language of the King James Bible, but there are lots of connections I would have missed or characters I would have forgotten about had I not done a more careful prep work before starting this novel.  It's the same trouble I run into with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. So long between books and you forget, and I'm not a big book rereader...

At any rate, those complaints have little to do with the quality of the book, which I found high. It is a little bit more airport thriller this time around--I think Cronin's literary ambitions may have faded somewhat--but it is still an exciting and compelling read. I think he's doing some interesting things with concepts of faith and religion (as the title might suggest).  If you like apocalyptic vampire books (and there are seemingly more and more of them out there these days) this is a pretty good direction to go. 

Who am I kidding? I'd give my arm to be as effective a world builder as Cronin? Thumbs up.

Grade: A-

Book: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

We live in a strange world. Celebrity has grown from a byproduct of accomplishment to an end in and of itself, and the upshot of it is a culture that is increasingly obsessed with itself and with its own image. We create viral superstars--cats with angry faces, news bystanders with catchy phrasing, children caught on tape being children--and then we discard them without a thought. We obsessively follow traditional celebrities--to confirm that they're just like us, that we could be living their lives if the cards had been dealt slightly differently--and then we revel in their failures, their flaws, their shortcomings. 

Teddy Wayne's The Love Song of Jonny Valentine chronicles a piece of this modern world, as well as in the additional burdens placed on child stars, by following eleven-year-old superstar Jonny Valentine on his second cross-country tour. As Jonny deals with the re-emergence of his disappeared father, the challenges of puberty, and an increasingly slew of bad publicity, he also  must rise the challenge of performing in sold-out arenas across the country. Wayne shines a satirical light on the trappings of celebrity--the hangers on who may or may not be true friends, the obsession with body image and media savvy attention to detail, the stereotypical manager/mom parental nightmare--but he also has a lot of sympathy for Jonny, who does not seem to realize when his parroting of the tabloid culture he lives in sounds more pathetic than knowing. He is, as the title indicates, a boy searching to be loved, and to define what exactly that means.

At times Wayne is overly obvious with his metaphors: Jonny's obsession with whether or not he is officially in puberty (and he models plenty of bad teenage behavior as the book goes on) is about as direct an acknowledgment as you could expect of the way he is trapped between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. His attempts at beating his favorite video game and his tutor's subject of choice (slavery) also have clear ties to Wayne's somewhat obvious sentiment that this sort of lifestyle may ultimately be extremely unhealthy for a child, tween, teen, or young adult--even the strongest of them. Subtlety is not his strong point in addressing this theme, but he does ultimately draw an interesting character in Jonny.  While the young star idolizes the rare star that does seem to emerge unscathed (Tyler Beats, as obvious a Justin Timberlake stand in as Jonny for Justin Bieber), Jonny's future is no where near as certain, as increasing revelations about his own behavior and that of his mother and father threaten to drag him down. Yet as silly, spoiled, and naive as Jonny was, I did still find myself rooting for and sympathizing with him. And as I am as quick as most to roll my eyes at the endless line of child-stars who seem to go off the deep end (Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, etc. etc. etc.) but Wayne reminds us with empathy that perhaps escaping such a fate is the exception rather than the rule and that children are after all children, and to expect them to grow up in such a crucible and come through unsinged is just not realistic. There is a cost for our entertainment, and it is paid with the souls of the entertainers.

It reminds me of the opening lines of The Great Gatsby--another, much better novel exploring the damage and the contorting impact that money and success can have. As Nick remembers his father's advice:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

I'd always assumed those lines were about the ways Nick judges people less successful than himself and his own moneyed family. But perhaps they're a reminder to be careful in how we judge Gatsby, Daisy, and even Tom. Money, success, and (today) fame may bring temporal satisfaction, but we cannot forget the price they charge as well. Being normal--like Nick, like Jonny's audience, like me--has its advantages.

Grade: B-

Book: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

So you take Professor Charles Xavier's School for the Gifted, you mix in a little World War II flavoring, a dash of generic YA lit, and a healthy sprinkling of gimmickry, bake it all together for 350 pages, and hope it tastes good, because you're really hoping you get a book series out of it. 

I feel like that must have been the recipe Ransom Riggs (no way that's a real name) was following in creating this novel. Though the book has plenty of bits and pieces that I like as ideas, it leans far too heavily on the "found photographs" shtick, and when that loses energy and reveals itself to be a bit of an empty contrivance, the book doesn't quite follow through with enough story to really pull me in. Trying to fit in these pictures, which clearly are forced on the story in ways that work well at time and work poorly at times, just doesn't really take the book anywhere interesting. None of the characters really seem developed beyond the two-dimensional images we are presented with, and Riggs, in preparing the way for future books in the series, leaves off with an anti-climactic climax. Even Jacob seems like a relatively uninteresting character, his battle with psychological demons not particularly well drawn. When your first person narrator is, well, boring, with clear motivations but a bland interior life, I think there's a problem.

Good YA is hard to do well for me. It's really not my genre of choice. And Riggs isn't doing it badly because there are a lot of fun ideas here (the young X-men, the time travel element, etc.) even if a lot of it is recycled. But there's not a lot here that excites me either. Frankly, I'd rather go read more good X-Men comics, like those written by Joss Whedon or Chris Claremont. They knew how to blend the "peculiar" with real psychology in interesting ways. Riggs tries hard, but doesn't really pull it off for me. 

Grade: D+

Book: The Art of Fielding

Why does Goodreads not do half stars? This was a solid three and a half stars, verging on four, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. For my purposes on this blog it's a B either way. I loved all the characters, I despised all the characters, I rooted for them, I rooted against them. Though the Moby Dick allusions and references made more sense due to my reading of Moby Dick earlier this year, the novel is also clearly no Moby Dick, and repeatedly touching it only highlights the gap in profundity between the two. Baseball still can be--maybe the only sport that can be--mythic, but most of the mythological elements here are too self-consciously literary to have the full impact. In other words, though it's an ode to baseball and ballplayers, I'm not sure this is a book many ballplayers would actually love. Though what do I know?

Harbach handles all four of his "focus" characters well, though he struggles more with Pella, and I wonder if it was the character that challenged him or the mere development of a female character. At the very least he tries to give everyone depth, demons, and dignity, and I think he's overall successful. I wish we had gotten into Owen's head, but he remains somehow ineffable and unknowable, which is how everyone else saw him as well. (Another literary reference perhaps? Is our Owen here a nod to Owen Meany of John Irving's novel?) Still, Henry and Schwartz . . . these are characters to know and to love, despite and because of their many shortcomings. 

I'm not sure why it took me so long to finish--I feel like I've been reading two or three pages at a time forever--because until the end I was continuously engaged and entertained. The final chapters of the book, however, seem ill-befitting, a wrap up too tidy and too deliberately novelistic (is that even a word) to work for me. The four protagonists went from being fleshed out figures to being characters in a novel in search of a tidy ending. It was disappointing and not quite authentic to me.

Still, on the whole, I enjoyed it, and if this is what Harbach can do with his first novel, I'm interested to see what comes next. 

Grade: B

Book: The Illusion of Separateness

I wish I had found the time to write this review much earlier, because much of the novel has slipped out of my mind at this point. Van Booy's intentions and central theme is stated clearly in the novel's title, a variation of the semi-famous Thich Nhat Hanh quote "We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness." Van Booy creates story after story, each the piece of the life of a character, each story woven together by coincidence, by choice, by fate/God, for better or for worse. Thing of the film Crash, but with more sensitivity and gentleness (and perhaps less ego).

Van Booy's characters are gentle souls who touch each other's lives in sometimes inconsequential and sometimes shocking ways, and by the time the story comes back full circle at the end of the novel, it is both expected and satisfying. The spirit of the novel is so sweet (despite some of the occasionally appalling acts described) that I can see the novel becoming a favorite of book clubs in the coming year, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I expected to be turned off by it, but instead I found myself moved and recommending it to friends. The lack of long-term impact of the novel impedes my whole-hearted recommendation, but it's still a very fast and very enjoyable read.

I should also point out that I received an advanced copy of this novel due to Powell's Indiespensible Book Club, and free reader's edition of novels is just one of many possible perks that club offers in addition to autographed and custom-slipcased novels. It's $40 every six weeks or so, but the enjoyment of getting a surprise box every so often is worth it. I highly recommend it.

Grade for Indiespensible Book Club: A
Grade for the Book: B+