New Century Reading

Tournament of Books 2014?

At the end of last year's Tournament of Books, the moderators put forth a list of books that they said might be up for the 2013 ToB. They cautioned that not all would make it, since it was so early in the year. I went through that list, highlighted several that sounded good, and went to work. By the time the 2013 shortlist was announced, I'd read 8 of the books that were on it--a very nice head start to this year's Tournament.

This year the moderators said they didn't have time to put together a preliminary ideas list and asked commenters to make suggestions.

Because--ahem--I have so much spare time on my hands and nothing of any greater importance to do, I went through all the comments and made a list of the books recommended. Again, who knows which of these, if any, will turn up next March. But at the very least, there are some really intriguing books on this list. So, for your edification and enjoyment, I give you: some possibilities for the 2014 ToB.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

Kate Atkinson: Life After Life

Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam

Matt Bell: In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Anne Carson: Red doc>

Edwidge Danticat: Claire of the Sea Light

Ariel Djanikian: The Office of Mercy

Tom Drury: Pacific

Warren Ellis: Gun Machine

Tim Finch: The House of Journalists

Neil Gaiman: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Lauren Grodstein: The Explanation for Everything

Austin Grossman: You

Rawi Hage: Carnival

Kent Haruf: Benediction

Aleksander Hemon: The Book of My Lives

Joe Hill: NOS4A2

Nalo Hopkinson: Sister Mine

Kristopher Jansma: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Stephen King: Doctor Sleep

Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior

Laszlo Krasznahorkai: Seiobo There Below

Jhumpa Lahiri: The Lowland

Wally Lamb: We Are Water

Jonathan Lethem: Dissident Gardens

Karen Lord: The Best of All Possible Worlds

Colum McCann: Transatlantic

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth

Alissa Nutting: Tampa

Lisa O'Donnell: The Death of Bees

Yoko Ogawa: Revenge

Ruth Ozeki: A Tale for the Time Being

Marisha Pessl: Night Film

Thomas Pynchon: Bleeding Edge

Ron Rash: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Karen Russell: Vampires in the Lemon Grove

George Saunders: Tenth of December

Taiye Selasi: Ghana Must Go

Lionel Shriver: Big Brother

Curtis Sittenfeld: Sisterland

Manil Suri: The City of Devi

Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

Juan Gabriel Vasquez: The Sound of Things Falling

Teddy Wayne: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Meg Wolitzer: The Interestings

Alejandro Zambra: Ways of Going Home

Bring Up the Bodies

I really am not wild about the American cover (shown above). I much prefer the British cover:

Ah well.

First off, can we all agree that that is a totally kickass title for a book? And it's relevant and used within the book, although not exactly as I expected, which was even better.

Second. I'm generally not a big fan of historical literature, for reasons I've talked about before. But I very much liked the first volume in this trilogy, so I was game for round two.

And hoo boy, it's a miracle, but here's a middle volume of a trilogy that I actually think is better than the first volume. The story is tighter, there's less extraneous matter, Mantel is more cautious in making sure we know who's speaking (instead of the constant "he", meaning Cromwell, in Wolf Hall, here we often have "he, Cromwell", which helps enormously). She does a marvelous job of ratcheting up the tension. I'm no expert in British history, but even I know that Anne Boleyn's life didn't end well. For me to feel anxious as the book went along, even though I knew the outcome, is a big plus.

And the characters are even more fleshed out this time around. Talk about a bunch of flawed, difficult people, operating in a highly politicized court. King Henry is far from perfect, but there are times I really felt for him. Anne is most unsympathetic, and yet when she reaches her end, it's touching.

And Cromwell. Here is a man I'd love to have as a dinner guest. It'd be a delight to have a glass of wine and shoot the breeze with him. But here's the thing: with Cromwell, don't have more than one glass of wine and lose your internal filters, because Cromwell forgets nothing and files everything in his mind for future use. He describes his tactics:

"Look, he says: Once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand."

All righty then.

There are several passages that I enjoyed immensely, both for how they fit the story and just the sheer pleasure of reading them:

"There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word."

When Anne Boleyn becomes pregnant:

"The happy news seeps and leaks through the court. Anne lets out her bodices. Bets are laid. Pens scribble. Letters are folded. Seals pressed to wax. Horses are mounted. Ships set sail. The old families of England kneel and ask God why he favours the Tudors. Francis frowns. Emperor Charles sucks his lip. King Henry dances."

And ominously,

"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."

Now I'm very anxious for the final volume. I feel like Mantel picked up momentum in this book, and rather than a transitional piece, as second volumes often seem to be, she surged with this. I won't post the final paragraph, but it's fantastic and definitely sets the reader up for the work to come.

The Round House

The Round House is the second volume of a trilogy by Louise Erdrich that began with The Plague of Doves. I liked the latter, although I had a few issues with it.

But The Round House? I don't even know where to start talking about how amazing this book is, on so many different levels. Erdrich is really at the top of her game here (which is saying something). This is a hard book to read, because of the violence and the justice system involved, but please don't let that stop you. You will learn many things you didn't know before, but you won't realize you're learning because the story and characters are so gripping that the education slips in almost subliminally.

Joe is the 13-year-old only child of Geraldine and Bazil. When a horrific act of violence is committed against his mother, Joe learns from his lawyer/judge father just how justice works--or doesn't work--when geographical boundaries are crossed involving Indian reservations and the white man's world. Being 13, and all that implies, Joe decides to do some investigating himself, along with his friends Cappy, Zack, and Angus. Beyond that, I can't tell you anything without giving spoilers.

I will say that I could hardly put this book down; my maternal instincts went into overdrive with fear and affection for Joe. I don't know if I've ever seen a better fictional example of the role community plays in the lives of small-town residents than this book. Or how a character who appears to be a bad guy up front may turn around in surprising, yet believable ways.

This is a smaller landscape than Erdrich often paints. She usually covers multiple generations or points of view, or both. Here we are solidly in Joe's head, with everything focused not only through his early teenaged eyes, but from the perspective of the older Joe reflecting back. I thought the choice of narrator was somewhat odd at first, given that the story seemed to belong to Geraldine, but it wasn't long before I realized the value of having Joe tell us the story. He sees reactions in the community that Geraldine probably never saw, and although it's the attack on Geraldine that sets the story in motion, the effects of the attack reach far more people, and Joe is in a better position to report on that.

Erdrich has usually been a very lush writer, downright mystical, but that's toned way back here. (Not completely--there are still lovely passages, especially about nature.) That's fitting with the narration by a 13-year-old boy. He's less likely to wax poetic and philosophically, and more likely to come up with observations like this one:

"Suzette and Josey's married children started pulling up in their low-slung old cars. When the car doors opened, the grandchildren bounced out like Super Balls."

The story is set in 1988, and the quartet of boys are Star Trek: The Next Generation fans, with lots of references to characters and plotlines from that venerable TV show. It's often funny, and yet, if you've ever spent any time watching the idealized world of TNG, it provides a painful undercurrent to the starkly different reality the boys live in.

I wish I could quote more--I marked several passages--but there's a danger of spoilers in many quotations, and I don't want to go there.

Building Stories

The Tournament of Books' nod to graphic novels comes with this entry: Building Stories by Chris Ware. I wasn't familiar with his work before this showed up on the ToB shortlist, but right after that, he did the post-Newtown New Yorker cover that I found very touching in an understated way. So I was ready to crack this open.

But, if you didn't already know, this isn't really a book. Or it's several books. In a box. With pamphlets and newsprint. When you open the box (pictured above), this is what you see:

Cut off the protective plastic, spread everything out, and here's what you have:

There are no instructions, no suggested navigation. Just a pile of varying types of print matter, all illustrated, some bound like books, some like newspaper, one like a Little Golden Book, one like a folded-up board game.

So that flummoxed me a bit, as I'm a traditional "start at the beginning and make my way to the end" type of reader. After dithering for a bit, I went back to the way the stories were packaged, and read them in that order.

It probably doesn't matter. They're not packed in chronological order. Most of the stories involve the inhabitants of a specific building, but as I got deeper into them, one character in particular took center stage. Her life as a single, lonely woman evolves as she eventually marries and has a child, moves to the suburbs, worries that she's losing herself, especially as an artist.

There are also a couple of stories about a bee. I found the bee annoying. I was much more interested in the people. Having been where the main character is, I found her story compelling, then wondered how I would have found her story back when I was post-college. Would I have found her narcissistic and boring? Probably. I saw a review on Amazon that complained about just that thing, and yet I found many of her stories really interesting and downright moving. There's one pamphlet that focuses on her, and there's no text at all, and it's not quite clear where it begins or ends (it's printed on both sides with no noticeable "start here" point), but it ended up reminding me of that amazing sequence from the movie Up, that tells the story of Carl and Ellie's marriage without a single word. I was moved, and that was surprising, given that overall I found the artwork kind of flat. Often I could only tell the characters apart by their hair color.

It's a mixed bag. Some things were successful, some not so much, and yet I found myself anxious to get back to it and start the next story, and found myself thinking about it after I finished it. The format, crazy as it is, seems to work with the story--how we live our disjointed lives, the different stages sometimes seemingly random in occurrence, parts of the past coming into the present unexpectedly, occasionally in a haunting kind of way.

I also found it interesting that the only blurb came in the way of a gold sticker on the exterior packaging, with a rave review from--can you guess? Who would you expect to blurb a literary graphic novel?

J.J. Abrams.

I don't think it'll last long in the ToB, but I applaud them for including it.

May We Be Forgiven

ETA: At 480 pages, this book qualifies as the second of six completed for the 2013 Chunkster Challenge!

Aw, man, I *so* was looking forward to this book. I've been a big fan of Homes for a long time, loving Music for Torching and This Book Will Save Your Life. I've hugely appreciated her dark humor and willingness to go dark places. I can't say I liked The End of Alice, but I deeply respected her bravery as a writer for going there. So when Viking sent me a review copy of May We Be Forgiven, I was delighted.

Until I read it. There are moments of Homes' dry wit and dark humor that made me smile, but unfortunately there were many more moments when I was rolling my eyes and groaning.

It's the story of Harold Silver, who has always been in his brother George's shadow, until George commits a horrific act of violence that change Harold's life forever and brings him into constant contact with his niece and nephew. So, yeah, between the plot description and the title, you can probably figure out we've got a bit of a redemption tale going on. But what we also have is a book that tries to be so many other things. At nearly 500 pages, it's packed full: boarding school shenanigans, elder care issues, the plight of a remote South African village, bar mitzvah planning, suburban sexual escapades, political intrigue, and a subplot in which Harold, a historian and history professor, is writing a book about Richard Nixon, a man he loves.

It's just too much. I haven't given spoilers in terms of what the act of violence entails, but let's just say that it's plenty to build a book around. Adding all the rest is just filler. And worse, it's "clever" filler. At times the humor is so strained, as if the author feels like she needs to be funny but can't think of a good way to do so.

Even worse are the racial stereotypes. Maybe Homes is playing with them to make the reader uncomfortable and to address how we perceive different ethnicities. Well, she made me uncomfortable all right, but more because the Asian people are wincingly stereotyped, and good heavens, the trip to South Africa is just cringe-worthy. As someone on Goodreads noted, there's an appearance by a Magical Negro, and let's not overlook the benevolent role the white people play for the South Africans. Someone else on Goodreads pondered whether or not Homes used this novel as a way to write off a vacation to South Africa. I can't say I find that idea far-fetched.

Oy.

The Song of Achilles

I don't get the appeal of this book. Maybe it's because I wasn't raised reading myths and didn't study them in high school or college, so they're not really part of my frame of reference. I mean, yes, I know about them in a very surface way, and I know they're the foundation of much literature, and I have read some of them. I haven't read The Odyssey or Iliad. It's a big gap in my reading. I know that.

But I found myself yawning over and over again while struggling through The Song of Achilles. Girl Detective compared it to Brokeback Mountain, but while I found the latter (both movie and short story) to be compelling and complex, Achilles just seemed--I dunno. Meh. While the two men in Brokeback Mountain were fully fleshed out characters (no pun intended), Achilles and Patroclus just seemed like "types" to me. Achilles is Mr. Perfect, part-God, everything he does is righteous and just and he's this uber-cool warrior dude and he's kind to Patroclus when no one else is, and they fall in love, yadda yadda yadda. Of course Patroclus would love him. Achilles is the only person who's paid him any positive attention for most of his life.

I guess what I needed was for Achilles to be more of a flawed man. His father was mortal, so that could have been. As it is, I just didn't really care about the outcome and struggled to finish.

Dear Life

Somehow I don't think I'm quite smart enough to really comment on this book. I'm a big fan of Alice Munro, although I sometimes think that I'm not "getting" everything she's conveying. I don't consider that her fault. She's not as difficult on the surface as, say, Virginia Woolf, but the simplicity of her text might be deceptive.

Anyway. I loved this collection. A few years back, Munro made noises about retiring, but apparently she rethought that. As long as she's producing work this good, I'm all for her continued employment.

The title sounds like something saccharine or cloying, like how precious life is, but the title story uses that phrase in a different way, as a young mother senses a threat to her child and snatches her out of harm's way, holding on "for dear life". That's a worthy interpretation of most of these stories, filled with people in decades-ago Canada, trying to find and hold on to what's important, or to cope with the loss of that thing so worth hanging on for dear life.

There are stories that have endings that are ambiguous, some that you see coming but wish you didn't, and yet they're the right endings, even if they're painful. The final four, including the title story, have a preface that notes they are all parts of one larger piece that is "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact."

Munro's style is something I have always admired. She can say so much in so few words, and sometimes with a dry humor:

"When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter."

Wow. I feel like I've learned so much about this mother-daughter scenario, and it's just one short paragraph.

Munro does sad amazingly well too, without sentimentality or pathos. There are characters in this book who broke my heart. (Don't worry, no spoilers.)

I have to admit I think this is kind of an odd selection for the Tournament of Books. Sadly, I don't think it will progress very far, although it's a wonderful book, but it's not as shiny or likely to be as argued-over (I could be wrong, though) as some of the other finalists. But it also makes me wonder if Munro is ever discussed as a potential Nobel winner. She certainly has brought to life a very specific time and place.

How Should a Person Be?

How should a person be? After reading this book, I think a person should be a lot younger than I am to fully appreciate this one.

There were parts I liked. There were parts that were mind-numbingly self-indulgent. There were parts where I rolled my eyes and would have considered throwing it across the room, if it wasn't on the cute little Kindle I just got for Christmas. I did finish it, so that's something. But I'm definitely not the angst-filled 20-something audience for this book.

Slight spoiler alert:

 

If your protagonist, without any trace of satire or irony, comes to a major life conclusion after sticking her nose in some man's hairy ass, you've probably lost me.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

I stopped at my local library this weekend to pick up a book I had on reserve (because in addition to having too many books to read at home, I also keep a lively library book request queue) (but supporting the library is like a civic duty, right?) and saw this book on the Bestseller Express checkout shelf. I don't know if all libraries do this; ours takes popular, high-demand books and has a number of copies that can be checked out for a fee ($4) and can only be kept 10 days instead of the usual 21. I've never used it before, but as I saw it on the shelf and reflected on the fact that I was #311 on the non-express waitlist the last time I checked, I picked it up, paid the fee, and drove home, hoping I'd have time to squeeze it in during the 10 days.

That was Saturday morning. Sunday before dinner, I finished it.

Best $4 I ever spent.

How could I possibly resist a book about family dysfunction, a mother (Bernadette) who disappears right before the family is supposed to head out on a trip to Antarctica as a reward for the middle-school kid getting perfect grades, the same mother whose intense dislike of the Seattle community and specifically the other parents at her daughter's school has caused her to retreat into her house and hire a virtual assistant from India to do things like schedule dentist appointments, another mother who's a brilliant parody (or perhaps not quite parody, even scarier) of parents who don't believe their little darlings can do anything wrong, and architecture, and Microsoft, and a mudslide, and what happens when creative genius is stifled?

Bonus: lots of humor, but lots of touching moments that don't tip over into gooey sentimentality.

Right off the bat, we learn a great deal about the middle school in question:

"Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet.

Student: Bee Branch
Grade: Eight
Teacher: Levy

KEY
S  Surpasses Excellence
A  Achieves Excellence
W  Working towards Excellence"

Global connectitude? A grade system that only recognizes levels of excellence? Author Maria Semple had me on that first page and held onto me through the wild ride that follows.

The narrative is a crazy quilt of emails, faxes, police records, and Bee's (the middle school daughter of Bernadette) narration as she tries to make sense of her mother's abrupt disappearance. Along the way, as the puzzle pieces come together, Bee learns--as does the reader--a whole lot about who Bernadette really is and why she behaves the way she does.

The humor that balances out the sadder parts of the book is much needed, and it should come as no surprise that the author has also written for Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development.

I guess this was my little weekend gift to myself. Loved it.

The Orphan Master's Son

There was so much hype about this book when it was first published. I added it to my library queue and forgot about it. (In a somewhat related note, don't you wish library queues were like Netflix, and you could only have so many things out at once before getting anything else? Then I wouldn't end up with the problem I have this month of too many books with long waitlists that can't be renewed showing up at once. Yes, there are ways to put requests on hold, but that means I have to, you know, remember to actually do that.)

I wondered if all the hype would prove fatal, but no. People--I love this book. I could hardly put it down.

The Orphan Master's Son is the story of Pak Jun Do, a North Korean whose mother, a singer, was "stolen" to Pyongyang, so he grows up with his father, who runs a work camp for orphans. Jun Do himself rises through the ranks to eventually become a professional kidnapper. As he matures and becomes involved in increasingly violent and political snares, he also comes closer to the "national actress", Sun Moon, who is loved by none other than Dear Leader Kim Jung Il, but who is married to Commander Ga, a man who dances a very dangerous dance around the Dear Leader. But there's also a young interrogator who is trying new methods of gleaning information from prisoners, in direct competition to the old-school pubyok, which relies heavily on horrific torture techniques to extract information.

So: there's violence. There's political intrigue. There's romance. Most of all, there's North Korea, a world I know little about other than the tidbits that show up periodically in the news. But if author Adam Johnson's written world is correct, this is a frightening place where so much as a glance in the wrong direction can have deadly consequences. It's a place where allegiance to the Dear Leader is demanded and constantly tested. Yet it is also a place where there can be moments of beauty and love--even if they're fleeting and dangerous.

Johnson is tremendously skillful at bringing this world to life without ever losing sight of the fact that what we really want to know about is the people. Jun Do, Sun Moon, Commander Ga, the interrogator, even Kim Jung Il--all are fully fleshed out and struggling to balance their very human needs against the backdrop of oppression and torture.

And the writing is wonderful, often heartbreaking. The interrogator lives with his blind parents, who have grown so fearful of their offspring that they only talk in platitudes about the Dear Leader. The interrogator suspects they're faking the blindness to keep themselves distant from him, and he begs them to tell him the truth. His mother responds: "Our eyes do not work. That is the answer to your question. But then as now, we do not need sight to see what you have become."

I guess I got a two-fer with this book: not only did I love it, but it actually more than fulfilled the hype.