What I’ve Been Reading

I’ve been working my way through the books in my house, the ones sleeping on shelves and teetering in stacks everywhere, in the usual random order. Rather than gearing up to write actual book reviews*, I’m more in the mood for talking about the books I’ve read lately, a very unscholarly, subjective business, rather like you and I are having drinks and dishing on the books we’ve read. So here now is some dishing.

A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin (1996)

I picked up this book during one of my Goodwill book sweeps, where I grab a bunch of wildly popular books for $2 each and pile them in a stack under my bedside table for snack-reading because sometimes, folks, snack-reading is called for. And one night I was in the mood; I wanted an entertaining page-turner that would immerse me in some other world. So I started this saga of the Starks and the Lannisters and the—oh, I forget, some other white-people-sounding names. It was a page turner, and it did immerse me in another world (a sort of medieval Britain, with magic), so it fit the bill fine. The story lines moved quickly and kept me interested. And as I finished it (well, you don’t really finish; it just propels you into the next book in the series), I pondered the best way to lay my hands on the sequel—Kindle, right now? Used bookstore tomorrow? I had an impulse to keep plowing through the books because I wanted to know what happened to these people—the blood-of-the-dragon lady, the brilliant but overlooked little man, the girl who’s good with a sword.

            But…here was the thing. I was tired of living in that world where pretty much no animal, except for some cool wolves, made it out alive. Animals die horribly in this book, all the time—cut down in battle, executed for maiming hapless humans, sacrificed in gruesome rituals that don’t seem to help anybody. It was like being immersed in a world where non-human life had no value (again, except for the wolves, who had the advantage of being royal pets). 
            And then there was the relentless violence against women. Martin and the HBO show’s producers have taken a lot of heat for that, and I find their excuses feeble—well, it was a different time, they say, and we wanted to portray the reality of it. I’m sorry—a fantasy book has some historical truth you have to portray? Since you’re making it up—it’s a fantasy—how about portraying a world where women aren’t constantly devalued, scorned as being too weak to rule, and referred to in terms of their body parts and weight? How about a book where masses of women aren’t institutionally raped during battles and conquests? Or where rape isn’t constantly tossed off with casual euphemisms like “he entered her” or “four of them took her”?

            I really had to ponder this after I finished the book. Truly, the story lines were so well crafted that I was tempted to pick up the next book and start reading. But I just…couldn’t. It’s like a video game that lets kids shoot people and blow up buildings. I despair of all the kids reading these books and internalizing messages like this. I have to stop and ask: As a culture, why do we do that to ourselves?

All the King’s Men

Robert Penn Warren (1946)

You know, that Robert Penn Warren, he could write. Holy smack. Exquisite, read-out-loud lines. Sentences that ran for entire paragraphs. Three Pulitzers, one for fiction (for this very book) and two for poetry. A writer’s writer. I mean, look at this, a little treatise on the obligations adult kids have when visiting their parents:

When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

            Thoughtful, beautiful, surprising writing. But I’m embarrassed to say I only got about 50 pages into this and had to put it down. I could not take the bleakness of this world. The meanness. I was in a bad place emotionally for it, I guess. Corrupt governor Willie Stark and his hangers-on were just too brutal, too Jim Crow South, too right-now America. Even the narrator, who seems like a decent guy, is so jaded and jaundiced that I felt like I was sitting in a hot, fly-infested bar, listening to him drone on and on and trying to figure out how to diplomatically dump him. In one scene some people are even mean to a really old, arthritic dog. And the n word is used endlessly. Yes, it was the times and all—I get it. But I tried reading this right after A Game of Thrones and just couldn’t do the mean-white-men world again. Maybe I’ll try this American classic another time. I mean, the guy could write.

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson (2004)

After Thrones and King’s Men, I needed a major change of pace. And I can say—though I just started it and am only partway through—that Gilead is the perfect antidote to those bleak worlds. It starts slow, then kicks in with a great story about a man in the late 1800s going on a fool’s errand with his 12-year-old son, looking for a grave out in the wilds of drought-stricken Kansas. That story is so crazy and wonderful—what sane grown man would do that, with a kid in tow?—that it pulled me right into the book. And the structure of it, a series of stories from the past, interspersed with glimpses of the present, that a kind but pragmatic father is writing for his small son to read years into the future, makes me want to write the story of my own life this way, tale by tale and impression by impression. Absolutely brilliant storytelling.

Just look at that book block. Swoon.

            My copy is a first edition, hardback with elegant cream binding and headbands. And its layout—the block, as it’s called in the book biz—is so beautiful and readable, the font size versus leading so perfect, that I had to take a picture of it. It just lives and breathes in the hand. Bravo, designer Jonathan D. Lippincott and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sometimes I read books on Kindle, but books like this make me happy they still exist in physical form.

Out of Range

C. J. Box (2005)

My friend Steve shares my love of Westerns and smart mystery novels; he got me addicted to the Longmire series**. Recently he loaned me this mystery, book 5 in a series about a game warden in present-day Twelve Sleep, Wyoming. Honestly, when I started this book I didn’t know what game wardens do (they enforce hunting laws), and it’s weird for animal-lover me to be reading a book about hunting. But it’s not about hunting, it’s about hunters—who, in a place like this where there is a lot of hunting, can be practically anybody. And in this story there’s endless intrigue among hunting guides, land developers, law enforcement, and politicians, all taking place in the magnificent and changing landscape of modern Wyoming. C. J. Box has a deft touch for characterization; in this book there’s an ongoing feud between a husband and wife that’s as real and painful as life itself, and even the smaller characters are developed with compassion and complexity. And it’s all anchored by a deeply moral hero who’s dead serious about his job but not always sure of himself. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, and I’ll definitely pick up the others in the series.

And I realize, reading over this, that it’s all white authors. My next job: Remedy that.

* Have you ever written a scholarly book review? They’re hard.

** I like both the Longmire book series and the TV show. And they’re quite different. The books are tidily plotted and beautifully descriptive, but they tend to use the same tropes too often, like Longmire getting injured and being a big he-man galoot who will go to superhuman lengths to catch the bad guys. And in the books it seems like every middle-aged woman who crosses his path falls for him. On the TV show he’s more muted, moody, and real, and the female characters are more three-dimensional than in the books. This whole blog post has turned into a treatise on gender in literature, hasn’t it? I seem to have a bone to pick.

My Year in Books, Part 2

A few more book reviews from the past year’s reading. (Part 1 is here.)


★ ★ ★ ★ ★  Doc
Mary Doria Russell (2011)

I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but on a trip to the local bookstore one day, that was what drew me to this brilliant novel about Doc Holliday. I’d been watching a lot of American Experience documentaries on Old West icons—Annie Oakley, Jesse James—and I’d had my eye out for a sharp, authentic Western, something recently written and meticulously researched. And the sepia cover of Doc practically jumped off the shelf at me. Doc details a year in the life of Doc Holliday, long before he stood alongside the Earps in the infamous gunfight in Tombstone. The Doc in this novel is a younger man, far from his home in Georgia and still getting used to life the wild West—specifically, the busy cattle town of Dodge City, Kansas. Mary Doria Russell’s atmospheric prose captures the sights, hardships, and nuances of everyday life in the boom-and-bust Dodge; it’s the kind of writing that keeps you up at night just to experience it a little longer. And her Doc is equally compelling, a moody gambler and nightowl who doesn’t suffer fools, is handy with a gun, quotes Virgil and Homer to the deaf ears of the townies around him, and really just wants to be a good dentist. But what attracts our sympathy perhaps most is Doc’s debilitating illness—the relentless tuberculosis that we know will kill him only a few years later. And he’s not the only one in trouble; the shy, taciturn lawman Wyatt Earp has his hands full with Dodge’s mob of crooked businessmen and drunken cowboys. And there’s a murder mystery afoot, but honestly, it plays second fiddle to Russell’s powerful, lyrical writing. You don’t have to be a fan of Westerns to enjoy this exquisitely crafted work of literary fiction. Doc was a surprise from beginning to end, and a rare book that I wished were longer so I could stay in its world a few more days.



★ ★ ★  The Tiger’s Wife
Téa Obreht (2011)

This bestseller came riding in on a lot of hype, mostly because its author, Téa Obreht, was in her early 20s when she wrote it. And it’s an exciting debut, set in the war-battered Balkans. The plot that loosely holds the novel together—a young woman coming to terms with the death of her grandfather, who filled her childhood with fantastical tales from his own youth—is told mostly through interlinking stories. Obrecht’s deftly constructed narrative immerses the reader in the characters’ world with little backstory or exposition; dialogue and imagery do most of the work, which makes for a satisfying, sensory reading experience. But while the individual stories hold up beautifully on their own—any one of them would rock in a literary journal—the seams that hold them together sometimes seem hastily stitched. And there’s a lot of stopping and starting: Just as Obreht gets rolling with a great story, she abandons it and quick-cuts to another, starting over with a new character and a different historical era. So what could have been a stellar collection of short stories is shoehorned into a somewhat frustrating novel. And Obreht’s magic realism—anthropomorphized animals, larger-than-life heroes and villains, and a man who never dies—has been done before by Marquez and his many imitators and feels a little stale. I also found myself wondering whether this book would have attracted so much attention if it were set in Omaha instead of the former Yugoslavia, a land exotic to most American readers. So, while I give high marks to Obreht’s storytelling skills and expect to see her short fiction winning prizes for years to come, I found The Tiger’s Wife to be less than the sum of its parts.

★ ★ ★ ★  The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta (2011)

This is another book that spent a lot of time on the bestseller list last year. And this one was right up my alley—a literary novel that feels like it could have been written by Richard Russo or Ethan Canin, but with a sci-fi premise. In this imaginative “what-if” novel, the leftovers are…well, everyone left on Earth. Two years before the novel begins, a strange event occurred: Millions of people—men, women, and children all over the world—simply vanished, leaving their bewildered loved ones behind. No one knows whether it was the Rapture or something else, but the world has been plunged into a sort of post-9/11 trauma, times infinity—the economy is in a shambles, and life has come to a virtual standstill as the grief-stricken survivors begin to realize that their missing family and friends are never coming back. But Perrotta isn’t going for cheap thrills with this provocative idea; The Leftovers is a deft character study of a handful of people dealing with mourning, loss, and survivor guilt in its many permutations. As in most good literary novels, its characters’ stories don’t wrap up neatly, as well they shouldn’t—these people’s lives are profoundly broken, and there’s no going back. But The Leftovers is anything but a downer; it’s a great read, full of human foibles and a surprising amount of wry humor.

My Year in Books, Part 1

This was the year I started reading again. Why I stopped reading is a long tale; the nutshell version is that a few years ago I came down with a mysterious illness that made me dizzy—constantly, every waking moment. Many things aggravated it: driving, walking, anger, talking to people who made me nervous, stress in general, grocery shopping, and—perhaps most distressing—reading. So for two or three years, books piled up around me but I couldn’t read them. It’s only been in the past year that I’ve been able to read again, but I found I was out of practice; I didn’t have a set reading time and routine like I used to, and I’d become embarrassingly addicted to television. But all those books were calling, so I figured it out—more or less—and am happy to present some book reviews from the past year’s catch.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★  The Mount
Carol Emshwiller (2002)

2012’s not over yet, but I can’t imagine finding another book that will take this one’s place as my favorite book of the year. The premise of this lyrical, wildly entertaining sci-fi tale is an uneasy one: Aliens have invaded Earth and enslaved humanity, but not in the usual TV-movie way, with plucky rebels taking potshots at sleek spaceships. In Emshwiller’s far more frightening world, the toddler–size aliens are so much smarter than humans that they’ve turned us into beasts of burden who work the fields and are ridden and raced by the wealthier aliens for pleasure. By the time the story takes place, this enslavement has gone on for many generations, and the humans are largely resigned to it. And for the protagonist, a young man who’s the favorite mount of an alien aristocrat, it isn’t a bad life: He gets good food, plenty of exercise to keep him in racing shape, and a warm stall to sleep in at night—often curled up next to his alien owner, also a youngster, who is completely devoted to his human pet. How the aliens control the humans—with a sense of entitled stewardship and the sincere belief that the humans would die or descend into barbarism without the aliens’ care—mirrors our own justifications for slavery in the past and, more immediately, our attitudes toward the animals who live alongside us right now. This important, mind-altering book is also a rollicking good read that may change the way you look at the cats, dogs, and horses around you.

★ ★  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson (2008)

Sometimes a thick, mass-market blockbuster lives up to its hype—Lonesome Dove or The Firm, for instance. And sometimes it doesn’t, which was the case with this book that probably needs no introduction. I’m going to swim against the tide here and say that though I tore into this first volume of Larsson’s trilogy with relish, I ended up quitting about two-thirds of the way through. It took too long to get going, and the dark parts were so dark that it made me not want to spend my evenings with this book. I gave up crime novels long ago for this very reason—they focus too much on a small, twisted segment of human society that I don’t want my dreams to dwell on. I did love that bleak little Swedish town in winter, though, and I kept feeling like the book was about to knock my socks off—any time now, any day now, maybe right around the corner. Then I just got tired of waiting and decided to read something I enjoyed instead.

★ ★ ★ ★  An Old Junker: A Senior Represents

Howard Junker (2011)

Disclaimer: I know Howard Junker, a little. He published one of my poems a few years ago in his fine journal ZYZZYVA*, and many of us West Coast writers consider him literary royalty. So I was delighted to find that he’d written a book about his experiences as an editor, and as a college student, and…well, as a person. And this book does not disappoint. Basically a collection of blog posts, it runs the gamut from reminiscences about his school days (and an astonishingly large number of soon-to-be-famous schoolmates) to the vagaries and gossip of life in the litmag world and the motley and combative writers who make up the San Francisco “scene.” The book is—like its author—funny, erudite, wide-ranging, and sometimes scathing (don’t get him started on Dave Eggers), and it touches on dozens of authors that I now want to read, particularly Ploughshares founder DeWitt Henry, about whom Junker writes elegantly and affectionately. The only curious speed bump is that An Old Junker is presented (at least on Howard’s website) as a “blognovel of old age,” which calls into question how many of the perfectly plausible stories are actually fiction. Similarly, the subtitle A Senior Represents doesn’t do the book justice; this is a fresh, entertaining journey through an unusual life, told through the very modern device of short, snappy blog posts. So, while I wished that the book would have picked a less ambiguous genre (or spelled out more clearly what makes it a “novel”), I loved An Old Junker and genuinely couldn’t put it down.

But that's not all . . . part 2 is here.

* When I got published in ZYZZYVA, I was invited to read at an issue-release party at the San Francisco main library. As part of the deal—and perhaps even more thrilling—I got to have dinner with Howard, along with a few other starstruck contributors, at a Thai restaurant. There were too many of us to sit at one table, so we had to split up into two groups. Normally well-mannered, I shoved my way through the crowd to grab a spot at Howard’s table. And I swear, it was like having dinner with Gore Vidal—he was gracious, charming, and funny, shifting gears effortlessly between literature and current events, world travel and good restaurants. But he was no snob; I got the impression he could converse just as easily about Netflix vs. Hulu or where to find a good mechanic.