Three Books That Broke the Reading Drought, Part 1

I had an odd phenomenon going on this year: I kept quitting books. I must have started 10 or 20 in a row—books that looked great, things I’d been wanting to read—and then got 30 or 40 pages into them, and put them down. I just lost interest and couldn’t get it back. A terrible case of the reading blahs. 

 

This happened enough that I wondered if my eyesight was going, or maybe something was wrong with my brain. Or could it be that I’d just fallen out of love with reading? Like when you go on a date with somebody who’s really great, but in the end, they do *nothing* for you down in the body? Could it be that the thrill muscle just didn’t thrill anymore? 

 

And then, much like dating, I found the right book and the thrill muscle made its return. And weirdly, I found the thrill three times in a row—three books that broke the reading drought and were so good that here I am, foisting little reviews of them on you, thinking maybe they’ll thrill you too. Here’s the first one; I’ll publish the other two in separate posts. 

Roads 

Larry McMurtry 

(Touchstone, 2000) 

This slim book, like an old flame, had been sitting on one of my bookshelves for years. McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is one of my all-time favorite books, and I’d read other things by him that I liked, but for some reason I’d never cracked this one open; it sounded too dour or something. One night, despairing of all the half-read books taunting me from my shelves, I pulled down this travelogue of the highways of America, and within five pages I was hooked—and the rapture lasted all the way to the end. And then I wished the book were twice as long so I could stay in that car with McMurtry for a few more days. 

The thing I kept thinking about Roads is that Larry McMurtry never would have gotten it published if he weren’t already famous. I mean, Roads is largely one man’s musing stretched over a framework of travel, as McMurtry drives the interstates north to south and east to west and back again. But the beauty is just that—the travel is the book’s premise, but the book is also not about travel. It’s about Larry McMurtry—his opinions, his memories, his passions (just listen to him go on about his love of the Plains), and his deep, long-earned research and knowledge about the American West. It’s also about people, some that he knew and some that he never met, who lived just off this or that highway. 

But the greatest thing about Roads is that it’s a book where a brilliant writer is writing about whatever the hell he wants to write about. That was what drew me most, and it’s also why I say he probably would never have had it published if he weren’t already a Pulitzer Prize winner and famous screenwriter (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment); in today’s marketplace, I can’t imagine a publisher would take a chance on the musings of some unknown author. But these are Larry McMurtry’s musings, and he’s so good at it; it’s like he’s just talking in the car there with you. And thank goodness he was already famous, because now we have this exquisite book that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, and as full of surprises as your uncle who works as a rocket scientist and also likes bats and Burmese food and Soviet trivia. It is a seriously fun, eclectic book. A very beautiful book. It renewed my love of travel writing, and a few weeks later at a library sale I picked up two more travel books and two early McMurtry novels, so it also feeds a delicious addiction. Even though I’ve now read it, Roads is again back on my shelf because I know I’ll want to dip into it again for quick bites, à la carte, of its oddly meandering, wholly satisfying essays. 

Check out part 2 in this three-part series—my mini-review of My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin.

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.