April, 2011: I know, I said I was going to be posting reviews at Goodreads. What I’ve discovered instead is that I sort of suck at Goodreads. (Yeah, I blogged about it.)
December, 2010: I’m now posting my reviews as blog posts, cross-posted from Goodreads.
March 13, 2010: My wife’s book club was generally charmed by Elegance of the Hedgehog. I finished it, but it wasn’t my tasse de thé. I liked Captain Freedom. It’s a clever conceit: a journey of self-discovery for a narcissistic and slightly over the hill superhero. It’s also a great springboard to a lot of pop culture satire.
I finished Lost Dog, by Bill Cameron, a crime novel set in Portland. I don’t read a lot of crime novels, but I liked that, too, especially the atmosphere he evokes.
But the big hit lately was Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper, a fast-paced, grimly funny story of an intern at Manhattan’s worst hospital–who used to be a mob hit man. Great premise, great built-in suspense, and Bazell is an MD, not to mention an encyclopedia of offbeat or sardonic information about medicine, which he weaves in using footnotes. And the ending … oh, my. It strains your suspension of disbelief, but you won’t stop thinking about it.
I expect you’re thinking — footnotes? In fiction? But trust me, it works. It really, really works.
Book with bookmarks in them right now include Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love Story, and a second attempt at Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, which is full of marvelous vignettes and is pitch-perfect at capturing the banality and quirky rituals of office life, but I keep finding I want more narrative momentum.
Sept. 25, 2009: Just finished Fluke, by Christopher Moore. Working on Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, as well as Captain Freedom: A Superhero’s Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves, by G. Xavier Robillard.
March 28, 2008: Oh man, where has the winter gone? Actually it SNOWED here today in the hills … so rumors of spring’s impending approach are somewhat premature. Anyway, I have been reading, though not as much as I’d like.
Most recently I finished Train by Pete Dexter. I read it because my first (as-yet-unpublished) novel is about golf, and Train is the nickname of the 18-year-old black golf caddie and golf prodigy in the book. The book is set in early 1950s Los Angeles, and damned if it ain’t a dangerous place. Danger pervades the book, which makes for an interesting atmosphere. The book probably isn’t as good as Paris Trout, which won him the National Book Award, but then Paris Trout ain’t got no golf in it. Still, Train gets golf right, has some really interesting messages about race relations (the other main characters are a white police officer and his wife), and uses language in a really cool way. Understated, but unique. But violent, this book. Not for the squeamish.
Before that I read Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which is a really good read, though I had an experience with it similar to reading Snow (see below): reading a complex, sprawling book with lots of characters that’s set (partially) in a foreign country isn’t always the best when you’re on the 15-minute-segments-on-the-train program. Still, I’d recommend it. But if you’re just sniffing around for a well-written novels set in India, I’d read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things first.
Now, with some reluctance, I’m trying to get into John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. I read The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire when I was in high school, and loved them both. But I’m having some problems in the first 50 pages of Owen Meany, since I’m busy and lose patience with reading about family backstory and varieties of religious devotion (though important, I suspect, later on). I’m going to float a half-baked idea here: if you live in New England, like Irving does, family background — pedigree — is a big deal. But if you live in the west, like I do, no one cares. So maybe I’m a westerner now, because I don’t.
Jan. 16, 2008: Finished V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and Michael Redhill’s Consolation. I have five pages left of The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way by Bill Bryson. A hearty thumbs-up to all of ‘em.
Now, onto Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Stephen Leacock‘s Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town.
12-14-07: I should have known better, thinking I’d update this more often. Bad John! Bad John! Anyhow …
Finished Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World. There’s a review on the blog.
Finished Gail Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden and was disappointed. It was a subtle story of healing, one that sneaks up on you. And I mean that in a good way. But the dialogue was stiff, and the prose was as spare as so many of the homes described in the book, but without being as beautiful.
I’m near the end of V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and just started Michael Redhill’s Consolation. Yes, two at once. I’m a regular bookslut, I am.
9-4-07: Just starting Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Just finished The Piano Tuner (see the blog for details). Recently finished Colson Whitehead’s The Intutionist. Also reading a book by Simon Cowell, which is cheerfully disgusting. It’s for research, btw, not pleasure.
I actually finished Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins when I was on vacation a while back. It’s an interesting book, but not only for the reasons you might think. The basic story (and I’m cribbing from Powell’s here) is that Perkins worked for an “international consulting firm that worked to convince developing countries to accept enormous loans and to funnel that money to U.S.corporations. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the American government and international aid agencies were able to request their pound of flesh in favors, including access to natural resources, military cooperation, and political support.”
It’s hard to know what to believe here. Either the US got a bunch of countries over the barrel thanks to Bechtel and other huge engineering firms, and engaged in the occasional third-party assassination, or coup (Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia) as he suggests.
Or, the US only invades countries (Panama, Grenada, Iraq), or attempts to overthrow foreign leaders and countries only if, you know, they’re behave really badly and attack freedom or something. Being somewhat cynical about US foreign policy (and its tendency to whack guys), not to mention corporate exemplars like the United Fruit Company, I have to think there’s something to his thesis. So in that sense, it’s good that this book is a bestseller.
But what’s not in doubt is that the “personal” aspect of this book is exasperating. He goes on and on about his conscience, and occasionally his love life, and even his piteous “lowly son of teachers at upper crust prep school” childhood, but the way he writes about himself is ham-handed and irritating. I got really impatient reading those bits, since I didn’t care about his tortured inner life. I just wanted the dirt on the US. It would have been a much better book if he left his confessions out of it.
Most recent book I finished was Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead, about a naming consultant whose crowning achievement is “Apex,” a spiffy new name for adhesive bandages. The consultant (who is himself nameless) is called in by the town of Winthrop to decide on their town name. The book works because it’s a wry satire on material culture, and it’s a decent look at the power of names. It’s also a discussion of whether renaming and rebranding are just ways to “hide the hurt,” to slap a bandage over an old wound–and in fact the consultant has a festering wound, put an Apex bandage on it, and it got horribly infected. But what I liked best was actually the tone, and the way Whitehead (itself an ironic moniker) uses language. Spare, a bit non-sequitur, very satirical. And brief.
Prior to “Apex” I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, who recent won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite its rave reviews, I can’t say I did backflips, in part for old-fashioned capricious reasons like finding the protagonist (named Ka, with an apparent nod to Kafka’s “K”) kind of annoying, even though I suspect that was kind of the point.
However, Pamuk does weave some impressive threads into his narrative. There’s a snowstorm, a coup, a series of plays at the National Theatre that both pivot the plot, a discussion of Islam, happiness, faith, politics … very, very rich. But perhaps because I was reading in 15-minute installments while commuting, also kind of rough sledding.
re: bookslut… my dad was one too, reading up to 3 books at once. our mom took courses in the evenings so dad had to put us to bed. we used to gauge how much we could act up after being put to bed by the thickness of dad’s book. one night when he put us to bed, he was reading something ‘jonathan livingston seagull’-like. we were happy. after he’d had enough of our antics, he came upstairs with the 2nd or 3rd book he was reading. it was rather ‘until I find you’-like. OUCH!