Beth is reading . . .

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

2009-08-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

It took me about two and a half days to read this book, and those were days during which I had plenty of other things to do. What I'm saying is, it's a very quick read. It was easy to read, which may explain some of its "astonishing" universal appeal.

It is difficult for me to really latch onto whatever the amazing bestseller list creators of this world latched onto when they ate this book up. I do not have children, nor do I have friends with children. I was fourteen years old just over a decade ago, and I certainly wasn't one in the 1970s with a nice loving family appropriate to that decade. I have not encountered murder, never known anyone who was murdered, or of any friends of friends who were murdered. I have watched a lot of Law & Order.

And that's what this book felt like, in a lot of ways. It trades on its dramatic irony too heavily for my money, as you know the killer and the details of the protagonist's death within the first chapter or two, I was primarily interested in if the man would be caught and how and so forth. Sebold focuses instead on the family dynamics and some intrapersonal dynamics that develop after the protagonist is killed. That is all well and good, but for my money her characterizations are not particularly engaging or thrilling. There are effectively sentimental or insightful moments, but nothing that challenged me to think differently.

Perhaps that is this book's strength, and a source of its popularity - it never really REALLY challenges you in a significant way. Sebold describes things well, if something erring on the side of purple prose, and it can be very powerful to have an unreliable narrator who is also omniscient? But overall, I just couldn't go with this book. Parts of it were really interesting, but there are some spoiler-related plot twists that I did not care for at all, that sustained the feeling that I was watching an episode of Law & Order that was trying to wind everything up in the last 12 minutes of showtime.

I didn't dislike this book, but I also didn't love it. I thought about not finishing it, but I finished it if only because it was so easy to do so, so easy to read and digest. I can see why it would get picked up to be made into a movie, but I also wonder how they will be able to commit it to film without making it REALLY cheesy.

I could see myself encountering someone who loved this book intensely that I already don't like, and getting into an argument about the book's merits. But I have not met that person yet. As it stands, this is mainstream packaged writing, very sentimental, very manipulative, very straight-forward, very traditional but with a "new" narrative twist and some versions of heaven that are palatable to today's am-I-or-am-I-not theist intellectual. I felt somewhat pandered to while reading this book.

There are better things for me to read, but there are also much worse things that the public in general could be reading. After all, you can't really beat up a book whose main themes include love, recovering from pain, learning to live, blah blah. Those things are universally appealing, they apply to all age groups, all social groups. Perhaps that is what stopped the book from engaging me, it was TOO universal in that way.

Also, most of the writing was not particularly impressive. I got the feeling that I was reading something that I could have conceived of and written. Yes, it's true that I did NOT conceive of or write it, and that Sebold did, so who am I to criticize - yes, that's all very true. But I enjoy books the most when they seem to be these messages sent across time and space by a person who artistry is somehow magical to me. How could Frank Herbert write Dune? I couldn't do it. Too much vocabulary, too much planning. I couldn't write even something like Blindness, another book I wasn't crazy about. But I couldn't have written it, or have come up with the idea. So good for them.

As for Sebold, I don't know. I guess this means she is a very accessible writer, and whether that is a good thing or not depends on each individual reader. I like to work a little bit, or have my notions about things twisted around, and so forth. I am not everyone.

I'll admit that amongst the many bits of sentimentality in The Lovely Bones, there were some that struck a cord and remained. I would never begrudge Sebold that. She succeeded wonderfully in a type of writing that I just don't particularly care for.

The end.

Dune by Frank Herbert

2009-08-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

You can imagine, already, that my impression of this book is very favorable, as I have read many things between my last entry here and Dune, and although a few have gotten close, none have actually pushed me back into an update.

Several weeks ago, I watched David Lynch's 1984 film adaptation of Dune. I was already on the verge of deciding to try out some fantasy or science fiction novels, I'd pretty much run my course with crime novels and cheeky fiction for the time being, and was feeling a bit bored and frustrated by what was available to read. The book I had read most recently was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which is a fantastic if emotionally draining book. I was beginning to worry that if I wanted to keep being impressed by what I read, I would need to suffer along with the characters I was interested in.

Science fiction is a genre that many people have told me I would love, and I have resisted reading it (with the exception of some Star Trek novelizations when I was in middle school, yes, there, I said it), for a couple of reasons. One is that it seemed intimidating - there'd be a whole slew of new vocabulary to learn and it was possible I'd have to actually know a little science, or be used to thinking in scientific terms, in order to follow the action of the book. I was hesitant despite the recommendations of my most trusted literary friends. I figured I'd put it on the back burner and it would be one of those genres that I'd get into when I was much much older. As it turns out, that honor will probably be reserved for extremely long tomes of classic fiction and/or biographies, because, hey, Dune.

As I was saying, I watched Lynch's film adaptation recently and, in addition to being thoroughly confusing, was very taken in by the basic ideas and aesthetic of the film. The dialogue, though cheesy, was very appealing to me for some reason, and the trick of having the audience hear the characters' thoughts via voiceover was one of my favorite narrative tricks. But this isn't about praising the movie. It is merely worth mentioning that the movie was intriguing enough for me to decide, yes, it is time to read a science fiction book and, yes, Dune is going to be it.

After a little searching (the library did not have a copy), I obtained a beat-up paperback of the novel (my favorite kind of book to read), and set to work. Almost immediately, I fell in love with this book. The dialogue remained cheesy, the effect of knowing the characters' thoughts in addition to their dialogue is achieved with the use of italics, and so forth.

Every section begins with a quotation from a number of documents regarding the protagonist that were written after the events of the book take place by a Princess Irulan, who does not appear until the end of the novel and even then has very little character. She gives us little snippets of legend and lore to carry us along, but the little attention she gets at the end of the book goes a long way, and you can see an actual personality poking out behind those quotes, stopping it from feeling like a cheap narrative trick.

A friend of mine made the mistake of asking me, "What is Dune about?" This proved to be a very difficult question to answer and I'm not sure I can do it here, either. It's about planetary evolution and preservation, it's about the politics of environmental resources, it's about gender, it's about the frightening power of religion and how easy it is to manipulate both religious text and practice for better or worse. It's about expanding consciousness, attempting to avoid war, it's about love versus duty, it's about the nature of friendship and the method by which one can negate potentially long hours of political negotiations. Oh, and gigantic worms that live in the sand, did I mention that?

Most of the action takes place on a desert planet, Arrakis, and the largest framework involves the struggle for control of this planet between the Emperor and two major Houses - one led by a Harkonnen Baron and one led by an Atreides Duke, Leto. Leto leaves his home planet, the water rich, earth-like Caladan, to assume control over Arrakis, which is currently ruled by the Harkonnens.

Arrakis is inhabited by a native population called Fremen, who have adapted to living on a desert planet in surprisingly and somewhat disgusting ways. Arrakis is the only location in the universe where spice melange exists, which is what makes space travel possible. The spice melange also functions as a drug in various forms, which is used by all sorts of people.

Paul is Duke Leto's only son, born to him of his concubine Jessica, and the protagonist of the story. The majority of the action involves Paul being stranded on Arrakis with his mother, adapting to the Fremen ways, and essentially becoming their prophet.

One more interesting thing is that, in this universe, computers and other "thinking machines" have been outright banned, and in their place, human beings are trained to use their full mental potential. Different sects are trained in different ways for different purposes - the Mentats are human computers frequently employed as assistants to those in power and are male, but there is also the clan of the Bene Gesserit, all trained in somewhat more passive ways, all women, their goal to recreate a kind of genetic engineering by strategically copulating and procreating with particular bloodlines. And by passive, I do not mean these women are powerless - they are called witches with some regularity, and are capable of extreme manipulations due to their ability to observe minutiae about those around them and the training they receive to control their own bodies and minds down to the slightest muscle, down to the ability to reconfigure the chemical structure of a poison so that it can be metabolized by their body without harming them.

Phew, there is just so much that I could continue on explaining without ever getting to an actual review of the book.

The Bene Gesserit are, for my money, the most interesting part of the book. Not all, but most of what they do, is conceivably within human reach, and so their existence serves as a reminder to the reader of what a human being is truly capable of. If we didn't keep all of our information inside glowing boxes and never actively think about it, we could be unstoppable. A test administered by the Bene Gesserit is that of the gom jabbar. The testee places their hand inside a mysterious box while the test administrator places a poisoned needle (that's the gom jabbar) at the test taker's neck. The administrator then applies psychological tricks and influence to convince the taker that the hand inside the box is undergoing extreme pain. The taker believes this to be reality, they can feel their flesh burning in agonizing horror. However, if they remove their hand from the box, they will be stabbed in the neck with the poisoned needle and die. This is a test used to determine whether a person is an animal, or a human. The distinction is, if you can act against your own self interest, which implies a sense of reason that is stronger than that of instinctual self=preservation, then you are human.

The book is full of things like this - statements about humanity, the nature of fear, the notions of future and past, etc., that are coached inside silly vocabulary and outlandish situations, yet retain a kernel of almost universal truth, or otherwise intriguing, broadly sketched out notions. Almost all of those notions resonated strongly with me, and I found myself easily accepting the ridiculous vocabulary that was an initial reason for me to reject this genre straight out. Fine, I feel a little silly when I go on a rant about the Water of Life and the gom jabbar, and the differences between when Paul is referred to as Paul, or Usul, or Muad'Dib, but WHATEVER.

This novel, though hefty, was a quick read. It's simply written, the sentence structure is very basic, Herbert does a great job of being accessible to his audience. The italics that mark different characters' individual thoughts work to add a fantastic layer of tension to a scene - each character seems more alive as you can read their exact thoughts and not an approximation (such as, "Jessica felt sad, or Jessica knew that her son was unprepared for the fight"). The difference is subtle and ingenuous. His breakdown of the book into sections using Irulan's quotes is also very helpful, as it means you can take a break every three or four pages, and yet he still has the book organized into three large sections. The vocabulary may be intimidating (even screenings of the movie involved glossaries, and the book has a few appendices in addition to a glossary), but if you are the same kind of reader I am, you'll never need to use those. Almost all of the words are easy to define for yourself using context, as they are repeated or explained within the text. It's not exactly A Clockwork Orange in terms of expecting you to adapt to an entirely new way of thinking.

To go back to its film adaptations - I know there is another one in the works, and that a Sci-Fi miniseries was done in 2000, and I am intrigued by both of these projects. However, I feel as though the best aspects of Dune are unfilmable. The action could be fantastic (Paul kicks one of his captors between the ribs and shatters his heart's right ventricle, and so forth), but the layers of tension within those fights (knowing the characters' thoughts, having the subtle meanings of each fighting gesture explained and contextualized in an abstract way) will never get across.

For example: a character named Feyd fights a gladiator-slave at one point in the book. Feyd is the Baron-to-be and wants to start taking control from the current Baron as soon as possible. Slaves in these fights are normally drugged (although this is the only fight we see in the narrative, so this fact is told to us directly). The drug would turn their skin green and put them in the grips of terror, making them easy to defeat. Feyd wields two blades - one long, one short, the longer one usually tinged with poison along the blade. The tradition would be to slay the slave with the poisoned blade, if possible, and then point out the effects of the poison on the slave as it takes him over to the cheering crowd. In this instance, Feyd has struck up a plan to fight an undrugged slave (skin painted green) so that he can accuse the Baron's slavemaster of incompetence and place a main of his own in that station. As a precaution, however, Feyd has had the slave hypnotized, so that if he utters a word ("Scum"), it will cause the slave's muscles to all suddenly constrict and freeze up, making slaying him very easy. Also, as Feyd does not trust anyone, he has tinged his short blade with poison instead of the long one, so as to confuse the gladiator slave (who will have his wits about him). THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION TO COMMUNICATE IN A FILM. It is all important for the tension of the scene, yet it's much easier and faster to read than it would be to watch.

Although a flop, it's worth noting that Lynch's Dune nailed its production design right on the head. The world Herbert describes is strange, its aesthetic is very specific, and the makers of 1984's Dune really did an amazing, amazing job. I know it received Herbert's seal of approval in that regard.

I have another science fiction book or two lined up, but it is not time yet. I am still stuck on Dune, very impressed by it, etc. It is worth reading the Wikipedia entry on it, as its historical significance (particularly being the first "ecological" science fiction novel) is extremely interesting in its own right.

This entry is messy and overly long, but its whole point is to get me back into writing here, so forgive me and it may pay off in the end.

She by Robert A. Johnson

2008-12-16T00:25:00.000-08:00

I first read this book at roughly the same time last year, and I found that revisiting it was worthwhile.

This is a book subtitled: Understanding Feminine Psychology, and it is Johnson's explanation of the feminine psyche (in both men and women) using the myth of Eros and Psyche.

There isn't much to critique from a book like this, but it has some personal significance to me, so I will make a few comments.

I did not consider myself a Jungian in any sense of the word prior to reading this book, and was in fact highly skeptical of dream analysis or mythological comparison having any usefulness in my daily life. I would not say that Johnson's book radically or suddenly altered my opinion: when I first read it I completely neglected the dream analysis portion of the back of the book, and scoffed at certain chapters. Much of it reads like a self-help book in the abstract - the "lessons" of the myth are frequently as simple and cliched as "take things one at a time" or "maintain perspective lest you get lost in insignificant and overwhelming details," etc.

These certainly work against the book as a piece of literature, and I am not sure what redeems this book for me. It may be that its very simplicity is welcome. In the face of heavy and complex literature, it might be a good idea to remind oneself that the mythologies much of today's stories draw on are, in fact, quite simple. They require that you, the reader (or listener) apply meaning to them, and it is a fun mental exercise to consider how or why these same stories have survived many generations and floated through different cultures. Such ideas are better addressed in the works of Joseph Campbell, I'm sure, but not everyone wants to start out on that heavy level.

If you have an open mind, and are interested in ways that myths might apply to our modern psychologies, this is a very simple and unassuming place to start. Treat it like a primer. Johnson has also written He and We, neither of which I have read, but I would like to obtain a copy of each soon.

She, in particular, is to blame for a subtle shift in the way I began to think about women and how they interact with men, each other, and themselves. It made me think of personal psychological progress in a different way. And it certainly affected the way I thought about meeting my partner's Mother (believe me, that capital M belongs there).

In other words, although this may fall into a literary category somewhere between storybook and psychobabble, there is inherently nothing dangerous about exploring some of the (admittedly) abstract ways our lives can connect to the lives of gods and goddesses from thousands of years ago. It can infuse meaning, or it can be merely a distraction during your lunch hour. It is an extremely short and simple book, after all.

I have been away.

2008-12-16T00:16:00.000-08:00

It only takes one comment, sometimes.

Hello. I have been away. Some personal issues and changes in my schedule have unfortunately kept me from updating this journal with regularity. I did not quite realize I was missed, but as that seems to be the case, I will attempt to update soon.

I was reading The Demon Flower when I stopped updating - I never finished the book, and actually found it to be quite dismaying. I have since read bits and pieces of things here and there, but the only entire books I have read are Naked Lunch and Nothing More Than Murder by William Burroughs and Jim Thompson, respectively.

I have begun to work on some writing projects of my own, which has slowed down my reading considerably. This is probably to the detriment of my personal well-being. Hopefully, I will soon be in a position where I have a smoother commute to work, as I do the majority of my reading to and from the office. Currently, I need to transfer buses, which only gives me ten to fifteen minutes of reading time at once, and this is not enough to sustain the mentality required for engaging with a book. My evenings are taken up by sporadic activities, including the sudden disposition to daily journaling, which requires an entirely different mentality from that of reading, a renewed interest in film, and the acquisition of a new boyfriend.

Given all that, I am also currently reading a non-narrative. I am reading The Goddess Tarot, which is nothing more than the explanatory book accompanying a deck of tarot cards a good friend gave to me.

However, I have recently purchased a number of interesting books, and when Christmas break arrives I will make it a point to read at least one of them. For now, I will make a short post on a short unknown book, and then go to bed. Thank you for continuing to read.

In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire by Mike Davis

2008-07-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

It took me a good long while to get through this book of essays. There is only so much really depressing socialism I can take at any given time.

Here, I'll sum this book up for you. "You think things are bad? Well you're wrong. They're TERRIBLE. I'm Mike Davis. *very dry joke that's almost impossible to laugh at given the circumstances of the world you've just been made aware of*"

Don't get me wrong. I like Mike Davis, even though I understand there is an anti-Davis element in the literary world that accuses him of being too dour and twisting the facts to fit his apocalyptic socialism-fueled views of the world.

It's good to realize that the problems of this country, and this world, and far deeper than just "some of us like Jesus and some of us don't." There really are systematic problems that have become bigger than any particular individual and therefore require an equally organized response.

Unfortunately, Davis doesn't seem entirely hopeful about a counter-organization. So each essay is sad and terrible and hopeless. That's why it took so long for me to read the whole thing. I couldn't possibly read it all in one sitting without jumping off a bridge and/or annoying the shit out of my friends.

There are a lot of interesting facts in this book, but unfortunately I have neither the patience nor desire to check up on their veracity. By the end of the book, I felt that doing so was necessary to make any informed review, because without the facts at hand I can't analyze Davis's slant. Are things really that bad? Really?

Davis clearly identifies with the underdogs in every scenario he describes, which is all well and good, but by the final pages it feels like the identification is compulsive rather than informed. I can't attack the man personally, I can only talk about my impressions of the book.

For example, the essay on the Sunset Strip "riots" showed a clear willingness on Davis's part to believe that teenagers are, on the whole, calm. He cites the cost of their property damage as if to assuage our fear of chaos. Teenagers don't need to smash anything to make adults nervous. Put one too many teenagers on a public bus and you can feel everyone's heart rate rise. And those teenagers aren't even protesting anything. No, I don't side with the police, and in the instance of these "riots" I have to side with the teens on principle. As Davis describes it, this is an incredibly fascinating event that I didn't even know happened.

There's a lot of that "I didn't even know that happened" feeling radiating from this book, and on that level I recommend it. But maybe in bits and pieces.

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

2008-06-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start adding pictures of the books, if I can acquire images of the correct editions. For example, this is the paperback cover, which is so much more . . . paperbacky than the original cover, as you can see:

Anyway, this book had been waiting patiently for me to read it. At first I thought I didn't have anything to say about it, although I enjoyed it immensely, but as I plumbed deeper into my own thoughts, I realized the exact opposite.

Many of the other books I write about have all this STUFF surrounding them. Of Mice and Men for example, is on the way. There's some amount of clout to them, whether it comes by way of critical recognition or mere shock value. I don't usually look at something, think to myself, "Oh this looks pleasant" and then get right down to it. You can ask Schrodinger's Ball, whose lime green cover and promises of mild intellectual challenges have been collecting dust at the floor near my bookshelf since late March while I passed it over for more frantic flights of fancy, again and again.

I also don't react well to clout, at times. This is why Siddhartha is bound to be neglected for awhile, and so on.

So why pick up Moral Disorder? Lately I've been drawn to short stories - in the past I was skeptical of short stories as art forms, don't ask me why, I guess I just didn't like what felt like a middling ground between poetry and novel. Lately, however, short stories have been all the rage for me.

I know a smattering of Atwood's poems outside of the collection Power Politics, which I know by heart and count as a personal influence in my own creative writings. So I surprise even myself by realizing that it has taken me this long to read any of Atwood's complete sentences. Maybe the titles of her books were just too daunting, or I was afraid I'd be getting into some overly poetical fiction, like I felt about A Spy in the House of Love. Short stories? Nice stopover to decide if I'm actually ready to try tackling the other novel of Atwood's I have sitting around, Surfacing.

Of course, none of this has to do with the book itself. The book is a collection of short stories that all center around one character, sometimes written in first-person, sometimes in third-person, perspective. She is a child in one, an adult in another - she is overshadowed by her parents, but then outlives them. Etc.

Atwood's writing is perfectly opaque. What she presents requires no interpretation, no reliance on outside philosophies, no comparison to other works. She writes so directly that I couldn't help but wonder if I was reading her diary or, at times, long-forgotten entries from my own diary.

This is the sort of thing that I always loved about Bukowski and, not to conflate the two authors AT ALL, Fante: the presentation of facts, both physical and psychological, were so direct as to be impenetrable. "Here," their works would say, and plop a huge heavy metaphor down on the table in front of you, "this is -how it is-." It is refreshing to read something that doesn't require intellectualism to move you.

But the major fault, if you can call it that (which you can't, I only do so for argument's sake), with these writers is that they are MEN. Their views on women and on themselves can help me understand what I would love to call a general "human" mindset, but unfortunately all they fleshed out was a very masculine point of view. Sometimes, it's easy to forget that there are other realities, because female writers can either be extremely feminine and write only of womanly things like flowers and dewdrops and, I don't know, Tampax or whatever. OR, they can try to adopt a more masculine genre, as Ms. Highsmith did. Or, god forbid, they can go in for Chick Lit.

It's an old feminist cry: women cannot be humans the way men can. Men have already set the standard for what is human, what is human experience. In a way, they have done so with books as well. We can choose the male authors who are most sympathetic or reverent of women, or we can go for Virginia Woolf, whose very sentence structure contains the sort of convoluted psychological and emotional superfluity that men are always ragging on women for. Don't get me wrong, I fucking LOVE Virginia Woolf, but she's not "practical" in getting the facts of the story across. The plot, like for many women, is all in her head.

In other words, how can a woman write a woman's life without just being either a reactionary or a lackey to masculine writing? Can she? What are her options? And then what are mine as a female reader in this situation?

What am I going to do to see my life reflected back upon me? Read The Devil Wears Prada? Try to find some modern parables in Jane Austen? What about ME, the intellectual, sexual, observant, creative modern woman who takes herself far too seriously but is still worthy of the respect of practical-minded folk?

There is a story in psychoanalytic circles of a patient who did not know she was cold until given a blanket. I think Atwood's prose might be my blanket.

These stories are just about life. They are about being an educated but earthy woman, a human being, a collection of memories, hopes, dreams, comparisons, imaginings. The actual subjects almost sound ridiculous: the protagonist remembers knitting for her baby sister, she remembers an overly elaborate Halloween costume she made that went unappreciated, she tells us the story of breaking up with a boyfriend while trying to study for an upcoming exam on Browning's "My Last Duchess." She recalls living alone, living domestically, caring for her parents, being smothered by her parents, etc.

I am reduced to profanities when I try to express how much I liked this. The stories were so real, so resonant. Instead of someone trying to predict how women feel, how life works for them, she just tells you. That's what I mean by opaque. There aren't huge loping metaphors, but there's a dense block of psychological reality nonetheless.

Finally, I felt like someone was talking to me, about me. That is far different from being entertained or informed. I felt connected. I felt the way I want other people to feel when they read whatever it is I may or may not end up writing.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

2008-06-15T14:30:00.001-07:00

The tagline on the back of my paperback edition of this book reads, "The psychologists would it folie à deux . . ."

This book was recommended to me by a very sharp and intelligent woman who was thrilled to have a chance to "talk shop" to another reader, even while inebriated. She thrust a worn copy of the novel into my hands and I must admit, the cover is very cheesy: a bright purple glove laid out against a flask atop what appears to be a newspaper, with some kind of metal weapon also in frame. Ridiculous. She implored me to pay attention to Highsmith's writing style, as Strangers was mentioned in the context of 1950s crime novels and the recommender wanted me to note what happens to the same story elements while in the hands of a woman.

She did not need to point this out. Highsmith writes with a particular attention to pure psychology - that is, whereas a lot of other writers (male especially) resort to metaphors in order to describe a characters feelings, Highsmith describes them plainly and directly. Of course, those metaphors -- black coffee, empty shell casings, the smell of honeysuckle, a twist in bones, crushing pumpkins -- have helped shape the genre of noir and crime fiction, they have become hallmarks and expectations. There is nothing wrong with them; they are one of the genre's greatest appeals and delights.

However, Highsmith's ability to astutely present the downward spirals of our main characters, Bruno and Guy, makes their world simultaneously realistic and staggeringly unreal. This is really a great effect - one that you might normally expect from reading a romance: two people meet in an unlikely way and around them forms a universe that "normal" rules cannot penetrate.

Oh, you don't know the story? Of course you do, this is a classic, thanks in large part to Hitchcock's film of the same name, which (from my hazy memory) maintains much of the tension but loses the actual psychological fear and desperation involved. Two men meet on a train. One, Guy, is more "like us," you could say. He seems normal, he's having some marital troubles, but he's relatively calm about them, alternately optimistic and nihilistic. It seems normal. On the train, he meets Bruno, who we immediately assume is "the crazy one" - one huge shining pimple on his forehead, a strangely concentrated but distant gaze, a drinking problem, and a tendency to start talking to strangers (how dare he!). Bruno eventually suggests the outline of "the perfect murder" - two strangers meet on a train, each commits a murder "for" the other one. The proposition: Bruno murders Guy's obstinate wife so that Guy can move on with his career and marry his true love, and in exchange Guy murders Bruno's overbearing and unsupportive father so that Bruno's finances can be freed up. The two men have no connection to each other (besides having ridden the same train), so the crimes will, ostensibly, never be solved.

Due to a strange mood and an undue amount of alcohol, it's never clear if Guy actually agrees to this plan, or leads Bruno on in any way, but Bruno moves ahead with the plan and murders Guy's wife.

It's difficult to explain the effect of this book - it's a dance between two minds and dissecting them is impossible without quoting huge sections of the book or ruining fun plot twists. For Bruno and Guy, it's madness at first sight, and the simple idea that Bruno has dragged Guy into this can be dispelled or at least questioned thanks to Highsmith's scientific presentation of each character's mental processes.

Whatever, just read it. There isn't much I can say. The novel results in tunnel-vision, very effective. It drags you along with the characters and makes it difficult to treat the story as something apart from you. Highsmith puts such a fine point on certain psychological developments that you can recognize them in yourself, even though -you've- never arranged murders with some dude you met on the bus. But once you see yourself in Guy, or Bruno, it's hard to turn back. In the same way, once Guy sees himself in Bruno, he simply cannot turn back. Lucky for the reader, the book ends and you can put it away.

Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich

2008-05-28T20:36:00.000-07:00

I would have looked at this book in a completely different manner had I any idea who Reich was when I picked the thing up. I bought it for all those reasons they tell you not to buy a book: a) good cover, b) cheap, c) short. But it also has a great title, and was illustrated by William Steig.

This entire book is Reich basically yelling at you for being such a weak-minded, pathetic, socially irresponsible person. But wait! you say, and then Shut up! he says.

If you can humble yourself enough to ignore that fact you're basically being screamed at in text format, then this book is actually a pretty good read. For all the social justice they tried to teach me in high school, and all the world perspective they tried to give me in college, this little book actually made me understand what my responsibilities as a common woman are. Is that weird?

This guy may be a total crackpot. I'm not sure. I haven't had a chance to research orgones, but I plan to. He is certainly angry, and arrogant, but it's forgivable. There isn't anything really forgivable about it in the actual writing, but in his life story.

Some of the best social philosophers would probably back up his thought process. He made me think of Foucault frequently - webs of power and oppressing each other and whatnot. But Reich makes it easy for you to digest, and Steig illustrates to lighten the mood as well.

In a way, you could say this book is about a failed career, an abundance of trust in science, failed revolutions, the cruelty of man, our tendencies to destroy our friends and revere our enemies, the destruction of love, the pornografication of love-making (yes, I made up a word, so what?), the importance of sex, the importance of responsibility, ignoring the Eye of the Other, reshaping your modes of criticism, and more! With cartoons!

I would recommend this book to almost anyone, actually. It's kinda funny, but it also makes you think. If you don't introspect, as a general rule, you will probably be insulted, or think the book is rather pedestrian. But I found Reich hitting on some important aspects of human psychology - little patterns of thinking that destroy our interpersonal relationships as easily as our political ones.

I wouldn't say this guy is a new disciple or anything, but it might be worth listening to him for even just one concentrated afternoon. I felt somewhat inspired to live differently, or more consciously (if that's possible).

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

2008-05-28T20:07:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, this book's write-up is getting a bit of the shaft, as I'm extremely tired and have read almost three books since finishing this one. Better late than never - just wait until I reread this for a proper write-up.

In trying to describe the feeling of this book, I kept coming back to one adjective: seething.

This book was an example of "apocalyptic California literature" in my geography class junior year of college (oh, UC Berkeley), and I had heard this sentiment echoed for some time before that. The reviews and blurbs all point to the violence, the growing push toward implosion, and so forth, unraveling within Hollywood.

The brilliant thing about Locust is that you don't notice this violence at first. The story opens with a frantic cavalry and mob, but it's on a movie set. The violence is simulated and practically comical. Slowly, as the novel goes on, the violence gets closer and closer to home.

By the time West gets to the impromptu cock fight in Faye's garage, your stomach should probably be starting to turn. What's really interesting is that the gut wrenching aspect of the violence, of the whole scene, isn't its brutality or its realism, but how unreal everything seems, and how casual the participants are in the face of blood and death.

The calmness with which everyone absorbs absurdity, blood, violence, sex, and a general human facade might be taken for granted, but you can imagine that Tod is not the only one having a strong emotional reaction to his surroundings, and that everyone involved is, in some way, seething just below the surface.

Faye is our protagonist's obsession, and like any proper obsession she arouses both desire and hatred. Tod is drawn to her, but is also constantly aware of how much she is an actress in daily life. Her very gestures are rehearsed and calculated movements - they excite him, but he knows his excitement has been manipulated by her, which makes him resent both Faye and himself.

Wow, the parallels with sentimental Hollywood! You are brought to tear by the latest schmaltz-fest, but only because it knows exactly what buttons to push, and wouldn't you (shouldn't you?) feel vulnerable and resentful about something so artificial and designed and un-human being able to move you? It reminds us of our pathetic emotionality, and Faye reminds Tod of his pathetic lust.

I will warn you, if you plan to read this book, please start dissociating a fat yellow animated character from the name Homer Simpson right . . . NOW. Otherwise, you may be unable to concentrate on the character of the same name in this book. He, too, gets bound up with Faye, but in a different way. Tod and Homer have a strange rivalry bond over Faye, and it's actually Homer that Tod is attempting to rescue, or at least reach, in the classic final chapter.

Throughout the book, Tod envisions a drawing of the burning of L.A., and as frantic, horrible, and outright apocalyptic as this drawing is described, it has nothing on what Hollywood actually is, already. Madness finally breaks free at the end of the book, the seething finally explodes in one scream, one big final gust of complicated emotion. His drawing does not come true, as you might expect when you first hear it mentioned. Instead, there is a version of the end of the world already present, at a movie premiere.

In West's Hollywood, in the thirties, we had already reached the end of the rope of human sanity. Things were already starting to crumble. At this point, shouldn't we all be screaming? And why aren't we? Because we're seething instead.

Great book. Also an excellent pairing with Miss Lonelyhearts, juxtaposing West's ability to provide us with outwardly emotional and genuinely good-hearted characters and more inwardly-focused and morally ambiguous characters.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

2008-04-27T00:56:00.000-07:00

Can you be moved by 59 pages of text?

Yes, you can. I can, at least. For years, I have had that standard copy of Miss Lonelyhearts paired with The Day of the Locust. My father gave it to me long ago so I could read Locust, and despite having that story referenced repeatedly throughout my college career, I could just never read the damn thing. I started to, a couple of times, but just never kept going. Sometimes, with books, it's a complete mood thing. That's why I stopped reading Falling Man and Gravity's Rainbow partway through. Not because I was bored or frustrated, or because the quality was poor. Just because I need to be in the right head space.

Well, Friday I was in the right head space for Nathanael West. So I took up the book and read it on public transit. I didn't get to The Day of the Locust, ironically, because I thought maybe part of the reason I could never read the story was that I always felt as though I were cheating by opening a book to its middle instead of its beginning. Miss Lonelyhearts was a truly splendid treat. I even quote it in my sidebar, now -- look to your right.

The eponymous character is a pseudonym for an advice columnist. People write in to him asking for advice, and he doles it out under this cute nom de plume, trying to give heart to people whose lives are suffocating under layers of shit. Examples of these letters, their desperately human pleading and horrific grammar intact, are included in the narrative, and help you understand the changes that Miss Lonelyhearts goes through.

This story made me yearn for time periods like the 1940s, when it was perfectly okay for an author to write using directly religious language. At this stage of book production and marketing, as well as the political climate, such a style would be unheard of -- it would pigeonhole you as a certain "type" of author with a certain "type" of subject or audience. But this unabashed use of Christ and religious ideas is not offensive or divisive in anyway. Miss Lonelyhearts works for a newspaper after all, and if there's a more godless place in the universe, it probably has a lovely view of a lake of fire.

Miss Lonelyhearts is, through his job, directly confronted with the suffering of all people, on all levels of society. Their problems are real, and they inspire despair, pity, and anger in him. This story tracks his attempts to try and find a kind of inner peace, or solidarity, amongst not only the chaos of his readers' lives, but the chaos of his own. He eventually likens himself to a rock, and the insane drunken antics of others to a raging ocean.

However, his "rockness" also makes him blind to what drives others, what creates and fuels their misery, and this is eventually his downfall. By denying the undulating humanity of his own spirit, he fails to recognize the way it functions in others, and this leaves him incredibly vulnerable to attack. After all, a rock is initially unaffected by the sea, but eventually the relentless pounding of the waves will wear that rock down to nothing. It will, no matter its solidarity, be absorbed into a dramatic, repetitive, futile process.

The sea is one of my favorite things to personify, so for Miss Lonelyhearts to conceive of himself as a rival to the sea rang so many analytical bells in my mind that it made my head hurt.

There is a real moral at the heart of this story, leaving the quote I have at the right as a bit of a conundrum. Is it deluded or noble to strive for order in a world bound for chaos? Do we, as Chaucer's Nun's Priest (I think, I don't remember The Canterbury Tales very well, for shame) would tell us, only rational to give in to the irrational, or is a central tenet of fascist-leaning philosophies more practical -- try to control the "nasty, short, and brutish" tendencies of man and you will succeed?

Maybe not for everyone, but for me, this book raised valid philosophical questions about how to live in a world full of suffering and pain, where the suffering is impossible to laugh at or shrug off. How can someone in the modern world succeed if they develop compassion? Is Miss Lonelyhearts some kind of journalistic Big City martyr? And if so, what does that mean about contemporary living, or modern-day interpretations of age-old martyrs' tales?

I should have found a way to study this story in college, but all anyone ever talked about was Locust. It's things like that that lead to fanciful day dreams of myself as a professor.

Skin by Roald Dahl

2008-04-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

This is a posthumous collection of Dahl's stories, which were originally published in the 50s and 60s, and I found it to be something of a let-down. The big standard, "Lamb to the Slaughter" is included, as well as a few other macabre tales. But, for many of the stories, I found the endings either predictable or anticlimactic. It felt as though Dahl had left early drafts of these stories lying around, and after he died some precocious niece found them and decided to send them off to a publisher. I much preferred Switch Bitch.

That said, this isn't bad collection, per se. I was interested. There was a very clever story about poaching that kept my attention. Dahl still has that talent of starting a story with you expecting it to be about the initial set of characters and circumstances, and then altering the focus as he goes along.

I'd say that the endings were still consistently unsettling, although they were certainly less surprising than those in Switch Bitch, and I plan to get another collection for comparison's sake.

For the love of God, don't read the back of this book. You will know the endings to a few of the stories that otherwise would have been genuinely surprising. It is lame.

There isn't really anything else to say about this book, except that the paperback cover of it is eye-catching enough to prompt people to talk to me while I am trying to concentrate.

And that is my completely thrilling commentary on the book. Whee!

I've completely lost my focus . . .

2008-04-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

No one knows it, but that subject line is the punchline to one of my favorite one-panel comic strips of all time. I'll see what I can do about uploading it sometime.

I've decided that I should ease up on this blog a bit. By which I mean, not always restrict myself to posting when I have book reviews/commentary piling up in my brain. This should just be the place for my literature-minded comments, so look forward to more interesting links and musings mixed in with book reviews.

As I am in the middle of reading Roald Dahl's collection of stories, Skin, right now, and as I would consider Dahl to be one of the few writers who has fascinated me my entire life (as a child, I quietly celebrated his birthday by reading as many of his books as I could on September 13th, I hope I remember that date correctly), I now have a very serious reason to visit the UK.

Check it out: http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/

This guy is the pimp of children's books:

and now for something completely different . . .

2008-04-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

"Why I Have No Taste" by Ben Hecht, from A Child of the Century

I prefer fine books and an exalted style and masterful probings. But when I read the other books, the ones sprung from equally ardent but smaller heads, I feel no lessened pleasure. I supply, as well as I can, what is missing. I skip what is too untrue. I am content with their smaller ambition. I do not praise them after they are closed, but while I read them I am as pleased as if no better books existed.

When I was a literary critic in Chicago, writing in the most iconoclastic publication of our times, The Little Review, run by Margaret Anderson, I could never attack books. I wrote only of books I could praise. I was ready to undermine in print such institutions as marriage, democracy and heaven. But books I could never sabotage, any more than I could publicly hiss actors.

My chief drawback as a literary reviewer was not kindness, however, but an inability to read any book through the assaying scale of my culture. When I read David Graham Phillips I was not aware of having read Gogol. When I enjoyed Paul de Kock, I had no memories of the pleasures of Stendhal. Each one, at his own time, was as good as the other. And with such an attitude one can never go far as a critic.

I used to argue about this with my friend, Sasha. He was Alexander S. Kaun, a smoldering Muscovite come to Chicago after some ineffectual bomb-throwing in the north of Russia. Despite this political activity, he was, basically, not a politician but a man of letters. He later became Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California in Berkeley. I never saw him in his cap and gown, for he died before my travels led me to San Francisco Bay.

In his pre-professorial youth, we argued during all-night sessions such as only political caucuses hold nowadays. In that time, sweet pause before chaos, literature was a more burning issue than it is at present. It is now a bauble in the hands of publishers, critics and readers. It was then a secret flame in the hands of the dedicated.

My point of view infuriated Sasha. I professed not to see any difference between a beautiful object and an ordinary one. I said that I liked all books in the manner that I liked all girls who were presentable. When with a girl of moderate allure, I did not disdain her because there were lovelier specimens in the world. Rapture might be limited, but criticism was surely out of place. And what did one gain by making oneself constantly toe the mark of preference--except fewer delights? In loving, or reading, a man was a fool to sit in judgment when he might lie in pleasure.

This aesthetic was lineal descendant of my young self in the attic room where I had found no difference in the charms of Nick Carter and Hamlet, nor outside the room, between hired girls and high-school princesses. A mediocre book or woman never lessened my opinion of myself.

I have outgrown some of this wholeness. But culture that deprives one of the many joys of being uncultured still seems to me a misuse of the mind. I have railed often against books in discussions with their readers. But it was actually the readers I was fomenting. The books were innocent.

A Treasury of Royal Scandals by Michael Farquhar

2008-04-02T18:14:00.001-07:00

The full title of this book reads: A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors.

Damn.

How could it possibly deliver? The paperback cover is a little cheeky drawing of buxom female member of royalty, all done up in the proper attire, with a smirk and a raised eyebrow on her face, and an anonymous hand down her front. Scandalous, indeed.

First of all, I genuinely believe that anyone who isn't interested in the naughty behavior of the European monarchs is either a liar, or someone I'm not going to invite over for dinner. This kind of stuff is where gossip hounds and history buffs can finally meet, their skills and interests finally converging after years of teasing each other on the playground.

What matters here aren't the dates, but who did what to whom, whether the action in question is fuck, kill, excommunicate, behead, etc. is inconsequential - the stories are great.

I'm one of those people who would never in her right mind spend money on a gossip rag. I don't care enough about Angelina & Brad, or even Britney, to ever spend hard-earned money on one of those things. However, when I am waiting in line for something, or at someone else's house with idle time, I will make a beeline for those same gossip rags. In a way, Treasury is a compromise for people like me.

You can satisfy your gossipy half by reading about who married whom, and your intellectual half by telling yourself, "It's practically history." No wonder this thing is a national bestseller.

Farquhar arranges the stories by theme, rather than chronology, which also gives it a fresh feeling. First we have transgressions of various important personages coinciding with the seven deadly sins. Then a little of horrible marriages, followed by horrible family relations, then horrible papal behavior, then horrible deaths, etc. At first it was confusing, but I came to appreciate it by the end.

If you think you will like this book, you will. I had my standards set pretty high, but there is behavior detailed in this book that genuinely surprised and disgusted me. It was all really really interesting, too. The descriptions of the inbred royal family members is especially enlightening.

I couldn't single out a single act, or even a list, of my favorite things detailed in this book. If you want a STAR magazine version of European history, I highly recommend Treasury. It's an easy read that can be done in chunks, if necessary, it's very entertaining, and it has short chapters. Even illustrations from the time period. What else could you possibly want?!

Blindness by Jose Saramago

2008-03-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, for once in a long while I can honestly say I read something that did not live up to my expectations.

Perhaps having recently read Camus's The Plague made me desensitized to the contagious outbreak/quarantine aspects of this story, because in this story I found them to be agonizingly drawn out. Yes, of course the government is going to round everybody up into camps of horrible conditions, of course they are going to say it is for their own good, of course it won't be, of course members of the government will start getting sick themselves, blah blah. Standard. But.

Let me back up. Blindness's strengths lie in the nature of the outbreak, which is one of (you guessed it!) blindness. A strange blindness where the afflicted can only perceive a "milky sea of white." Naturally, this white blindness was described repeatedly throughout the book, which felt repetitive and sometimes annoyed me. I was very interested in the bigger picture of a blindness epidemic, but Saramago focused on a small group of individuals reacting to the outbreak. It's not his fault he didn't give me what I wanted, and he's not a poor writer because of it, but I certainly felt unsatisfied when I was done with the book.

It opens very strongly, though - the sudden and inexplicable appearance of a medically unknown type of blindess is described effectively, stunningly, and quite beautifully. As the instances of blindness increase, a quarantine is established, and all the blind (or exposed to blind) people are sent to a facility that used to be an insane asylum. This I found to be unnecessarily overt thematic foreshadowing, why not a mere abandoned hospital? I'm not so stupid that I don't understand quarantined people, especially blind ones, will eventually display myriad types of insanity. Anyway.

Our plot focuses around one woman, the wife of the opthamologist who examined the very first person to go blind. After the first blind man visited the opthamologist's office, the doctor goes blind himself. As he is being loaded into the ambulance that will undoubtedly take him to the quarantine, his wife lies and says she, as well, has been striken with the illness. She never does, however, go blind, and she becomes the vehicle for exploring the disintegration of society. She is, literally, the only one who can see it.

Saramago's style of dialogue is dense. There is almost constant dialogue - many nameless characters are speaking, and their declarations are separated only by commas. There are few paragraph breaks, as well, so every chapter feels relentless. This is very effective in conveying a sense of blindness - tracking the speaker of the dialogue is practically as difficult for the reader as it is for the blind, and all the characters are reduced to little more than disembodied voices calling out repetitive phrases and worries.

I'm not sure what else to really say about this book. It was certainly interesting - I was never bored while reading it, and the thought of -everyone- being blind is much more terrifying than I initially gave it credit for. There are, ironically, very intense visuals that I retain from the story, and it definitely made an impact on me. However, there was just something missing that made it hard for me to completely engage with the story or the characters.

I have the feeling that, over time, this will seem like a much better book than it seemed when I first completed it. I just wanted to write about it now, while it's still fresh in my mind. Maybe I'll come back to it as I process it. Or at least when I'm not frantically writing during my lunch break. Ha ha.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille

2008-03-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

Be careful, guys. I recommend a lot of things that are a tad "off," you know. Like, about serial killers and sexual perversions and whatnot. But those books have got nothing on this. Holy crap.

Here is what the quotes on the back of the book say:

"Bataille's works . . . indicated the aesthetic possibilities of pornography as an art form: Story of the Eye being the most accomplished artistically of all pornographic prose I've read." -Susan Sontag

and then the intense one:

"Bataille denudes himself, exposes himself, his exhibitionism aims at destroying all literature. He has a holocaust of words. Bataille speaks about man's condition, not his nature. His tone recalls the scornful aggressiveness of the surrealist. Bataille has survived the death of God. In him, reality is conflict." -Jean Paul Sartre

And, get this, the book is only ONE HUNDRED PAGES long! That's it! For so much intensity?! I could hardly believe it.

And I didn't believe it. Not at all. Within the first chapter, there is some really disgusting talk of peeing into cunts and whatnot. Not exactly what I expected. The perversions only get worse (or better?). I felt duped.

Let me back up.

The story revolves around the narrator, a young man, a woman he meets when he is young and who he discovers his sexuality with, and two other significant figures: an innocent young girl they corrupt and drive insane, and a wealthy Englishman who provides monetary support when they are running from the law. A bullfighter and a priest both provide important symbolic roles, even as very minor characters.

If I were to outline for you exactly what these two main characters participate in, you might not believe me. Really, you wouldn't. I don't want to ruin anything, though, in case you do read the book. Let's just say - deriving sexual pleasure from pissing on the face of a dead woman with open eyes is not the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

But I had the stomach, I muscled through. Despite the depravity, one thing this book definitely ISN'T is boring. About fifty pages through, I finally took a break and stopped to think about what I'd been reading. I didn't find any of it to be titillating, and found the majority of it to be so disgusting that I couldn't refrain from actually frowning as I read it. And then something happened. It hit me. The point of the book came shining down like sun on an otherwise gross San Francisco afternoon.

Even sexual meaning is arbitrary. Don't just gloss over that sentence. Really read it, and think about. In a culture obsessed with sexual norms that are, by the by, very straight and narrow, the notion that our love of pecks on the cheek and the missionary position (hallmarks of chaste, proper sexual union) is just as legitimate as a sexual desire to drop soft-boiled eggs into a toilet and then pee on them is a SHOCK.

People will accept perversion, but only one step at a time. They say, okay, well, I guess oral sex is all right. Or, I'm okay with men sleeping together, just as long as I don't have to see them kiss in public (or some variation thereof). Fetishes are recognized. We can thank (?) the internet in large part for making all kinds of pornography available and transparent. But let me tell you - I've been on the internet, and I have not seen anything like what was described in this book written before we even had the goddamn television.

Only through extremes, I suppose, will we truly be able to grasp that all meaning, even sexual meaning, is arbitrary, and therefore equally valid. I do not want to participate in ANYTHING they described in this book (one thing, maybe, but it's very tame), and yet by the end I could see how it was sexy. I could understand. It's a matter of association, really, and how the manner in which we first encounter sexuality can set a standard for the rest of our adult lives in terms of sexual and romantic preferences.

Go through the book of your life and put italics in random places, and the "meaning of life" for you can change drastically. That is what this book made me realize about my sexual preferences. If, for whatever I reason, I had had more cause to remember the "Little Mermaid" themed fantasies I had as a child, and ignored the traditional "Hollywood star at a fancy party" ones, then I could have turned into a person who wants to fuck fish. I am, also, a potential pervert. So we all are. And, weirdly, that's something to celebrate.

I'm not sure if I'm getting this across properly, because I'm very tired and I just wanted to write down some of my thoughts before my enthusiasm for the book wears off.

I guess what I'm saying is, Bataille uses depraved imagery to depict a divine truth about humanity - our possibilities are endless, even if they are arbitrary. Meaning is a complete jumble, and most of the meanings we choose for ourselves are so naturally developed that we don't consciously realize we're choosing them. And yet, those same very natural, very normal and indispensable meanings would be rejected by everyone else. The protagonist of the book declares that he likes not "pleasures of the flesh," but "dirty" things. He, the corpse-loving piss-playing menstrua-sniffing murderer, is offended by the idea of "pleasures of the flesh." (A phrase that, incidentally, always makes me think of soft-core porn. Can you conceive of soft-core porn as offensive?)

And, although this paints a picture of complete isolation at your very core, your sexuality, I don't think that's the point. If you let your disgustingness develop naturally, you can easily find the right people to be disgusting with.

Even writing this I am getting re-excited! What a great book. What a great great book. Suddenly, the quotes on the back no longer seem overly intense, but not intense enough. I'm shocked.

[I only recommend if you have both a strong stomach and a strong mind. If you do, then I recommend highly, more highly than anything else I've reviewed.]

Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondences from the Edge of Modern Romance edited by J. Knelman and R. Porter

2008-02-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

I've gotten really busy lately, unfortunately.

Well, it's fortunate. I actually obtained a job, which is seriously cutting into my time. You can expect this blog to be dormant until I've settled into my new schedule.

In the meantime, pick up Four Letter Word. It's a collection of fictional love letters written by a smorgasbord of authors from around the world. It's alternately sweet, funny, tragic, and so on. The introduction by the editor Rosalind Porter was inspiring enough for me to start up another blog to share letters I've written. I've placed a link to that new blog in the right-hand column, if you're interested. It's called "Anostrophe," the explanation of which is in its first post.

I've always enjoyed writing letters (anyone who knew me in high school knows that I took the whole "note passed in class" concept to another level), but I never get a chance to enjoy reading them. I've been told I'm most intimidating through writing, which is a much nicer explanation for why I've received so few letters during my life thus far than the one I like to fall back on: you're all lazy punks.

Anyway, as much as I loved composing and coveting the receiving of letters, I never really considered them an art unto themselves until reading this book. I knew that we could recognize the personal letters of already established authors as art, but I never felt as though one's writing ability could stand upon letters alone. I really responded to this collection, because it made me feel that I can cultivate letter-writing as an authentic and worthwhile form of writing. That may seem obvious, but in a world of not only e-mail but Facebook and MySpace wall posts, the concept of an actual "letter" is practically akin to myth.

I'd like to bring it back down to reality, if I might. If you don't read my letters, then at least read the letters in this book. They are better than anything I could ever write. The first one is from Mars to Earth, although there are more traditional love letters as well. Many have to do with family, and there is far more sadness than I expected, so if you're one of those "I'm not a sap, I'm not reading a mushy book of mindless cooings" kind of people, drop the bitterness and pick up the book instead. It covers all the bases.

Just read the first half or so (as far as I've gotten at the time of this writing) and try to tell me you don't wish you could either compose or receive such powerful condensed direct statements of emotion from one human to another. And even if you can tell me that, I won't believe you.

Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

2008-01-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

I had seen the majority of the first book's plot acted out for me over a series of weeks by the lovely folks over at Showtime, and I expected to have a similar feeling about the second installment.

I could not have been more off-base. Whereas I could have definitively said I preferred the show over the books before reading this sophomore effort, I now confess the two mediums are in a dead heat to provide me with the best version of the Dexter character.

For one thing, Lindsay is much more violent and brutal in his descriptions than a television show could ever match. As opposed to other fictional serial-killer narratives, these Dexter stories shine light directly upon the depravity of both the killer's mind and his acts. While Dexter's kills go mostly undescribed, those of his "foil" killers are very horrible and Lindsay doesn't shy away from the gruesome details. The appeal isn't in couching the serial killer in a deeper shroud of sexy mystery, but in throwing the harsh Miami sun right into the depths of his heart.

This idea didn't strike me until I got to the descriptions of Dr. Danco's murders in the second book. I don't want to ruin anything, so I'll just say that a mirror is involved, and that's when I started thinking about reflection, revelation, and self-examination.

Dexter remains an undeniably likable killer, but I still wouldn't want him anywhere near my children. He is obviously deranged, and has a skewed world-view at heart. At one moment, he is saying that he feels at home during the Miami rush hour traffic, because everyone on the road is acting like a homicidal maniac. We can fully identify with him at such moments. At others, though, he is perhaps reading too much into a child's enjoyment of the game "Hangman." When the consequence of Dexter's depravity is a joke, we can all get on board, but when the consequence is either ignoring (or creating) homicidal tendencies in children, his true nature as a threat becomes clear.

I think this is what gives Lindsay's books a power that Ellis wasn't able to with American Psycho. Dexter's search for others "like him" makes it harder to see him as an isolated image we can laugh at and dissect. To find others like you is a genuinely human desire, constantly reminding us that Dexter isn't an isolated archetypal monster the way Bateman is, but that he is a human. It's much scarier to see humanity in monstrosity than the other way around.

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl

2008-01-22T20:07:00.000-08:00

I can't talk about any of these stories without completely ruining them. It's essentially like reading four extended dirty jokes. As with any good dirty joke, they all end with someone being humiliated or harmed or somehow ironically put out.

But, every story is something like forty pages long, and there is good character development. That means that you can't just laugh off the endings like you can with a dirty joke, because you actually grow to like or possibly care about the characters, so their sudden transformation into a punchline can actually hurt you.

A quick read, very fun, especially good for those of you with twisted minds.

The Plague by Albert Camus

2007-12-31T23:07:00.000-08:00

I didn't want The Stranger to be the only novel by Camus I ever read, and the latest Vintage International paperback edition of The Plague had an excellent cover, so I found myself again wading the waters of this Frenchman's "idea writing." I call it that because there is much more (roughly) objective description of emotion and psychology in this novel than there is dialogue addressing those same issues.

As might seem obvious, this novel is about an outbreak of plague. It takes place at a port town named Oran and quickly leads to a quarantine. From within the shut walls, we are able to follow this lives, even in broad outline, of a doctor, a journalist, a priest, a criminal, and various others. Each one struggles for hope or escape, sometimes achieving these goals and sometimes simply discarding them for new goals.

I absolutely loved this book. I relished every page, rereading entire paragraphs frequently. Camus occasionally seems repetitive, but he is actually circling around a very fine point and only after a little while does he finally hit that point on its head. It is worth the wait.

There isn't much of a plot to examine, and the characters are such vehicles for philosophy that it's hard to talk about them as individuals. This is, essentially, a novel of ideas and not events.

Sorry this entry is a little scant, I've been very distracted lately.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

2007-12-31T22:52:00.000-08:00

My views on this book are necessarily filtered through what I know of the Showtime series "Dexter." Most of my impressions of the book are actually impressions of the adaptive work Showtime did in bringing the protagonist to the screen.

What's particularly different about Dexter is that (and I'm talking about the book here), he doesn't seem particularly cold. Although he is confiding in the reader his desire to and enjoyment of killing, it never feels as though he would ever kill you. This creates a strange pact with the character, drawing you into his difficulties and decisions because, well, if you're not on his side you'll probably end up dead.

The comparison of killers to artists is common in the crime genre, especially when describing the most depraved and psychotic of killers. Lindsay's novel, however, gives a new angle to the killer-artist by having his narrator-protagonist introspect in different ways. Dexter lives only to kill. The rest of his life is a safety shell erected to spare him suspicion or difficulty in achieving opportunities to kill. He is frequently distracted by everyday life, even by his family and friends. I think anyone with a strong creative drive can identify with the idea that everything but practicing that creative art is merely a distraction, one that makes you feel human and normal, but also one that is capable of making you soft and lazy.

The plot of this first Dexter novel seems to unfold very quickly, and I say "seems" because I spent weeks watching the same plot unfold on screen whereas I read this book in a matter of hours. There are definite merits to this character and his exploits remaining literary, however. Certain depictions of murder and murder scenes are capable of eliciting the right amount of mingled humor and horror only if they are primarily left up to the imagination. Filming them would be next to impossible - there are too factors in creating just the right mood. When reading these scenes, you provide your own music and scenery, and if they are off just so, you will get the wrong impression. Or, at least one that doesn't keep you engaged with the story.

I personally found this book to be not much more than a quick and entertaining read. I can certainly see how someone with an eye for television would pick up on this character immediately - although this novel is a completely enclosed story, it begs for another episode. The character is rich with possibilities and potentials. I already have the second book in this series in my possession, and will read it the next time I have a hankering for the purple prose of cheeky killer.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

2007-12-27T20:47:00.001-08:00

It's lesbian pulp. That may mean something to you, maybe not. A poor girl, growing up in the south, quickly becomes comfortable with genitalia of both sexes, finds out she's a bastard, makes loves to another girl when she's in sixth grade, makes love to some cheerleader in high school, excels in school despite poverty, gets to college, sleeps with a sorority sister, gets kicked out, has to take a shit job, finds some solace in a friendship with a gay male, gets mixed up with older women, goes to film school, reconciles with her adoptive mother (in a way), and so forth.

This is the world of lesbian pulp. Nobody slows down for long thought-out emotional diatribes like in heterosexual literature. Nope. Stuff just happens. Girls just get things done. It's exciting. It's empowering. It makes me want to make love to a woman, but only the woman who is a protagonist in a lesbian pulp.

They sure do know themselves in this novel. Even the stand-out protagonist has become a stereotype over the last twenty years. This doesn't make the reading less entertaining or anything.

The Rules of Attractions by Bret Easton Ellis

2007-12-27T20:35:00.001-08:00

I've only read three books by Ellis: American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and now this one.

Ellis is, truly, an existential writer. It hurts to read some of this stuff. Attraction swiftly carries you along. It's easy to read quickly because distinctions between minor characters become as meaningless to the reader as they are to the main characters. You just zip right along. It does have the feeling of capturing fleeting thoughts, their repetition, their meaninglessness, their overlooked attempts at insight.

So, I would say that this book, of the three, is the one that focuses on the particular existential angst of relationships. It can be summed up in the line repeated throughout, "Nobody ever really knows anybody else," and its additional idea: we just have to tolerate each other.

This book left me wondering if, indeed, I have a moral center. If everyone else in the world is just like me or if, perhaps, I have something or lack something that makes me essentially different. Then I wondered if we all have this sensation, in our own ways, from time to time. And so on.

Try to fill the void with sex, and you get these people: young, drunk, totally out of touch or maybe in touch. Who knows? Who can tell?

Not only am I very tired, I also have lost the initial passion I had about this book when I first read it. I would recommend it, as I would the other Ellis books, to young people with a streak of darkness in them, as well as a penchant for willful self-destruction under the guise of "fun."

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

2007-12-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

Just so you can understand the context within which I read this book, here are two quotes from the covers of the edition I read:

"Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." -Stanley Kubrick

This quote is the one that gives the book "hipster" status, like listening to music that David Bowie listens to before it gets big. But the quote on the back is the truly intense one:

"Thompson is my particular admiration among 'original' authors. The Killer Inside Me is exactly what French enthusiasts for existential American violence were looking for in the works of Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy and Raymond Chandler. None of these men ever wrote a book within miles of Thompson's." -R.V. Cassill, Book Week.

Now that is an opinion. A statement that seems even more intense after being assigned Hammett in a Berkeley English class, and after considering the status Chandler has attained and Thompson hasn't. I have never read anything by McCoy, so we'll leave him out of it for now.

The other novel of Thompson's that I have read is Savage Night, which I happened upon the same semester I was assigned Hammett's Red Harvest. It was at this time, when I was directly comparing the two authors, that I found myself heavily on Thompson's side. Savage Night was a book that, were it a movie, would have been directed by Hawkes or Wilder. Except for the last fifteen minutes, which would have belonged to Lynch or Tarkovsky.

The Killer Inside Me has made me want to look into the genre of first-person-killer narratives. Already a fan of American Psycho, Mr. Brooks, "Dexter," and the like, I wish to know how much this genre owes to Thompson's book. It hits what have become all the expected buttons: a disgust or amusement with "regular" people, a feeling that the victims deserve or ask to be killed, a complete awareness and twistedly reasonable acceptance of a "sickness," and, of course, almost compulsory involvement in "normalcy" as defined by a respectable job and romantic attachments.

Lou Ford is our killer, here, and he is wonderfully crafted. Thompson has this beautiful trick of using the first-person narrative primarily as a way of describing actions, delaying the opportunity to reveal our protagonist's detailed thoughts and feelings concerning those very actions. It is like slowly filling in a sketch with color paint. Beautifully done.

Thompson also does something wonderfully fun that he did in Savage Night as well, which is to comment on literature from within literature. When Ford begins to tell us how he killed his fiancée, he refers to the way that writers allow their prose to get sloppy when their characters are excited. He says that he won't do that, he will slow down and tell you exactly what happened, in the right order, with complete coherence. He calls those other writers "lazy," which made me blush because I pulled such a hat-trick in my own novel.

Ford's method of dealing with the mounting desire to kill is also fun. He socially "needles" people, purposefully talking in colloquialisms and annoying those around him under the guise of innocent friendliness.

So, there is certainly a sense of humor running underneath this story of evil, which also seems to be a theme of the "killer" genre. Whether this humor is the result of identification or uneasiness is probably a moot point, but it's interesting to ponder nonetheless.

Thompson has a great visceral style, describing physical sensations with intimate metaphors that make you believe he's actually experienced some of the things he's putting the protagonist through. He also crafts very interesting plots without overloading you with characters in the way that I felt Hammett did.

I only wish this book had been longer, but I suppose that indicates its quality, since I don't wish it were shorter, or believe it would have worked had it been shorter. Unfortunately, it's the perfect length. I didn't want it to be over.

Also, I hope they never try to film this. Or, if they do, they should hire me. And somehow cast a thirty-year old Henry Fonda in the leading role.

Wake Up, Sir by Jonathan Ames (cont)

2007-12-06T13:26:00.000-08:00

I forgot that I started this blog for me to vent about what I'm reading, not analyze it all in a way that the rest of you can easily understand. So ppphhhhtt. I'm giving this book another go.

So, Alan is like the child in this book. An orphan, in fact, albeit a thirty-year old one. Jeeves is a very parental figure - he provides physical necessities, anticipates needs, provides support, and so on. But he doesn't provide too much in the way of guidance. Occassionally, he tries to share his view of life (his theory is that life is like a movie, hundreds of hours of footage boiled down to a short narrative history of key moments), but it tends to overwhelm Alan.

But Jeeves's detached manner stops him from providing the kind of support that parents can give. Because he is nonjudgmental, he never stops Alan from engaging in unhealthy behavior, although he may point out that the behavior is, objectively, unhealthy.

In another way, Jeeves is like a therapist, with his consistent responses of "Yes, sir" or "Very good, sir" to Alan's sometimes complicated theories about himself and others.

In a way, Jeeves presence makes me wonder, If practical concerns were taken care of and we had nonjudgmental support, would the other troubles of life cease? Or even lessen? Well - yes and no. Alan says his life motto is "live and don't learn."

Okay, I feel better, now.

Wake Up, Sir by Jonathan Ames

2007-12-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

The blurbs on the back of my edition of this book are all the same single word: "Hilarious." I'm inclined to agree.

The story centers on a young writer (and alcoholic, of course) who takes a brief visit to an artists' colony with his valet, Jeeves. Yep, Jeeves. It's so surreal that there is a valet character that there are times when I suspected it was all a figment of the protagonist's imagination. Thankfully, it was not.

Basically, Jeeves was hired after a bright bit of inspiration (and big lawsuit check) came to Alan, and he, Jeeves, feels like the real centerpiece of the book. Of course, Alan is the big character and he does all kinds of charactery things. He provides us with all the action, however drunken it may be. He was incredibly easy for me to identify with, and I imagine anyone with either literary leanings or a good dose of seemingly circular self-inspection would feel the same way. He's funny, he's smart, he's full of himself in the way that only the self-loathing can be. He is very very real.

The realism of his character, however, is perfectly offset by the ridiculousness of Jeeves's presence. Jeeves is frequently Alan's sounding board, witnessing his employer's life with "detachment." Aside from plot summary and praise for this book, it has left me thinking about the notion of a personal servant.

What good would a valet do any of us "normal" individuals? He could lay out my outfits in the morning, pour me a glass of juice while I am still in the shower, close the blinds when I do not want to get out of bed but the Sunday sun is bothering me. And, of course, be a sounding board. But would it do any good? Practical concerns are lessened and ostensibly your stress would be reduced as well. But, as an impartial observer and servant, Jeeves provides no true second opinion, offers no real advice, but merely "rides the wave" of Alan's personality and moods. He is non-judgmental, the type of friend we could all use. But he is unfamiliar with tough love, the type of friend we frequently need.

Whether Jeeves improves Alan's life is a moot point. I don't want to take this humorous novel too seriously. But, I find the notion of a personal servant for just some middle-class Jewish self-proclaimed Anglo-Anglophile intriguing.

Sorry for the short entry, but I'm getting back into the swing of things and I'm also very tired.

This book, like most of them, is highly recommended. A quick and easy read, but written by an obviously smart man, about another smart man, and a detached valet. I would love to discuss this with someone.

NaNoWriMo

2007-12-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

So, it's over. I can resume reading, and then writing about what I've read in this blog. Aren't you thrilled? You should be. I plan to start off easy with Wake Up, Sir, and then finish off the two I was working on before NaNo started. Now, my thoughts on my first year of NaNoWriMo.

I did it. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I knew it would be easy. If my three blogs don't prove that I can produce 50,000 words a month, then what else could? I had difficulty writing on one topic, however, and keeping my plot consistent. Here is a short rundown of what I remember my book being about:

Main character, Catherine. She has friends, she dates, she's surprisingly like me. She gets into a relationship, leaves it for another relationship. Pretty boring stuff. I became bored with myself, and changed it up. She has a psychotic break, of sorts, and goes off the map. What happens next is the author speaks to characters from earlier in the book, trying to figure out where she has gone. A journal of hers is discovered and we read again from Catherine's point of view about her psychotic break and return to sanity. She works to avoid the author, but runs into her outside of a photo-development place in Nebraska. She falls asleep in a revival theater and on the train ride home in the morning, meets someone who makes her laugh. The end.

Of course, there are a lot of quirks in there, but that is as simple a "plot line" as I can describe. I suppose it's open for reading, but it's unedited and will most likely be a disappointment.

Now, back to the reading of those who are worthy!

Hiatus.

2007-10-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

I stopped reading at the beginning of this month, around the same time I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I am distancing myself from other writers, because I want to have my own idea and style when I try to write my own work. If all goes according to plan, my novel will be finished at the end of November, and I will resume reading Another Country and From Dawn to Decadence at that time.

In other news, I have decided to cut down on the number of books I lug around with me, so if you want to borrow, or take, something I've read lately, just let me know.

And don't hold your breath for a review of my own book. Maybe I can hire out for that one.

How I feel about reading.

2007-09-22T12:56:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog, I didn't expect anyone (except perhaps my father) to ever read it. It was, admittedly, just a place for me to put all my thoughts about what I was reading. A place that my annoyed close friends could go if they did, in fact, care about what I had to say. Not that I find my friends to be callous; I simply know my own tendency to go on and on and on when they have nothing to contribute to the conversation because they haven't read said book. This blog was like a humanitarian gesture.

Slowly, more people have started reading this blog. As a result, I feel I should say a few words about myself as a reader (or a general appreciator of the arts).

Every time I post about a book and write that it's "recommended," a little voice in me says, "You recommend everything. You are not a critic. Why would anyone trust the opinion of someone who likes everything? Can you even have an opinion if you don't reject things?" It's an annoying voice that I'd like to beat up.

A critic is defined as one of three things. Formally, a critic is someone who a) expresses a negative opinion of something or b) judges the merits of an artwork, often professionally. Informally, a critic is "a fucking douchebag."

I never want to tear something completely apart, because I've noticed how books and movies that mean nothing to me can mean the world to someone else. I don't think my opinion is right enough to be followed as the general standard of evaluating things. I'm not Immanuel Kant, for the love of god. I refuse to codify arbitrary standards of evaluation just so I can make my opinion (read again: OPINION) seem more respectable and objective. I read books of all kinds for my own enjoyment, why pretend I'm after anything else?

Since I'm predisposed to excessive thinking and feeling, saying I prefer books that "make me think or feel" is redundant. Streetlights can make me think or feel. Mailboxes. A withering flower. A newspaper article about iPhones. An episode of "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends." I like when an author describes an event or emotion better than I could have. I like when an author respects my intelligence and abilities. What a reader craves and what satisfies that reader depends upon, surprise! the reader.

The reader is more important than the author. The difference between Dashiell Hammett's academic acknowledgment and Jim Thompson's seemingly unalterable "pulp fiction" designation is about who read them, not which of them wrote better.

If anything, my interests in writing here, or talking about books in general, are twofold. One, I want to find value in books that have been denied recognition by the canon or mainstream. Two, I want to emphasize that a book is not an entity truly enclosed within its covers - a book contains roughly the same amount of mental energy that the reader brings to it. I, as the reader, have the power to turn a bad book into a good one, and vice versa.

What I'm trying to say is, I rarely dislike a book because I rarely dislike myself. I want to enjoy myself, I want to see value in things, and I'll insert it there if I'm able to. If you're not interested in finding value yourself, but in reading what your dinner party guests have already accepted as "excellent" or "dreadful," this is not a place to come for recommendations.

Phew, talking about this has a tendency to rile me up. Had to be done, though.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

2007-09-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

Preface: This is the first book by Pahalniuk I've ever read. No comparisons to his prior work or style will be possible. I say this because I feel obligated to, due to his giant, unrelenting, stubbornly loyal, and often obnoxious fan base.

Rant is the kind of book I would have shit myself over when I was nineteen. Pardon the French. Its secondary title is "An Oral Biography of Buster Casey," and this format allows Pahalniuk to play a lot of fun games with his reader. Of the people "interviewed" to discuss the life of Rant, we hear from parents, neighborhood friends and enemies, doctors, city friends, landlord, employers, with a various number of cultural figures thrown in to help establish the alternative world of the novel: epidemiologists, historians, anthropologists, etc.

It's telling that the first character to speak in this novel is a car salesman. Although his opening statement is relevant to the events of Rant's life, his following statements are sporadic discussions of the sales technique "shadowing," or "mirroring." This salesman is the constant reminder of an author: he's a cultural figure known for greedy manipulation and his persistence in the narrative adds an extra layer of doubt to the story.

The oral narrative gives Palahniuk the opportunity to immerse his reader in a world that she doesn't entirely understand. That way, when the characters begin to talk about their world apart from Rant, the reader can feel a certain click of understanding - a complicated plot coming together, a small piece of information that casts a new light on everything she's read previously.

The most obvious example of this technique is the designation to every character of a symbol - either a sun or a waning moon. Although possible explanations for these symbols slipped in and out of my mind, my predictions of their meaning were far less interesting than what they turned out to represent. Should I tell you? I fear I can't. As the book goes on, certain terms take on entirely different meanings: historian, honeymoon, party crashing, game night.

I started this blog in order to talk about books I had read and thus save my friends from listening to me go on and on. There is little I can talk about in relation to this book, because I don't want to rob a future reader of its little joys.

Rant deserves a second read, the same way a movie with a twist-ending begs to be watched again, for clues. But I would never say Rant has a twist-ending. Instead, I'd say it's a cleverly calculated world that unfolds piece by piece. No piece is a genuine twist, but it does reveal a warped version of our own world. In terms of the alternative history genre, this is an interesting example. Instead of having protagonists muse on "the state of the world" or a painfully expository first chapter, Palahniuk just pushes forward, basically tricking the reader into assuming that this is a biography about a person in our world, instead of in his.

A quick enjoyable read that also exercises your brain muscles, Rant was fun. It is very visual, has some excellent ideas, and will stay with you for awhile. Again, I don't know anything of his other books, but I would say that in this case, unusual ideas do not necessarily equal brilliant writing. I recommend it, but I wouldn't shoot it straight to the top of your list, either. It certainly has shelf-life, as most alternative-histories do. And it's certainly a book I would read again, for what it's worth.

Crash by J.G. Ballard

2007-09-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Lately, environmentalists have been making a big deal out of the notion of a "human footprint" on Earth. Indeed, as a society, we've marked our landscape with varieties of our technology, everything from cars to ships to buildings to oil rigs. We've pockmarked and scarred our planet, if you want to think of it that way. It wouldn't be a stretch for me to convince you that these creations of ours have moved, in turn, to make a footprint on us. That is, our society progresses (or doesn't progress) in ways that are hemmed in by what we have created in the past. We must operate within the framework that we've built up around us, and in this way we are affected by inanimate objects.

Ballard, bless his heart, takes this relatively simple abstract notion and brings it as close to home as possible. In this novel, he doesn't focus on the effect that cars have on human society as a mass, but the effect they have on individuals. And, oh no, not individual psyches, individual bodies.

The vehicle, so to speak, for this kind of exploration is the car crash. It is through car crashes that our main characters experience, as intimately as possible, how the human body changes when it is acted upon by a machine. Not only is there new flesh within scars, there are also bruises and limps, body parts that are slightly misaligned during reattachment. In extreme cases, a car crash causes a melding between human flesh and machinery - false limbs, leg braces, and so forth.

As if this notion of human flesh interacting with metal was not enough, Ballard uses Crash to explore this new metallic-physicality through the all-purpose lens of sex. Basically, if you are squeamish, do not read this book.

Ballard's writing style is flush with abstractions - his narrator is lost in a dream world of symbolism, and projects that world onto the behaviors of the people around him. This is an interesting way to approach the topic of pure physicality, perhaps the only way to do so in print. There are chapters of psychology that I failed to grasp - it appears our protagonist (also named Ballard) has sexualized his traumatic car crash, but there is no direct treatment of that psychological reaction. Ballard (the protagonist) and his wife have a deviant, hyper-sexualized relationship, and if the reader is unable to connect with their pre-car crash sexuality, then the post-car crash sexuality is only more bizarre.

The turning point in the novel, after wading through abstract chapters and wincing through disgusting injury descriptions, comes when Ballard (the protagonist) and a crippled woman named Gabrielle finally make love. Guess where they do it? Just take a wild fucking guess. In a car! By the airport! It's as though the only two locations in this entire book are either "inside a car" or "near the airport." Often, both.

As they progress in their sexual encounter, both Gabrielle and Ballard realize that the body parts commonly associated with sexual arousal are not providing stimulation. Once they begin inspecting each other's scars - with fingers and tongues, they become aroused. Ballard tells us that over the next few sessions, he always orgasms onto her scars (he's particularly fond of one in her left armpit).

There is almost too much information in this book to process. The commentary is overwhelming, and teasing it all out would result in an essay as long as the book itself. I am tempted to write such an essay, nonetheless. Just the fact that the author uses the most clinical terms for the human body (vaginal mucus? anus? rectum? semen?) is a complex statement about the human body as trumped up machinery, and thus machinery as a stripped-down body. I mean, damn, this book is loaded.

I feel as though I must say something about Cronenberg's film, Crash, in relation to this book. Approaching this subject through visuals is very very effective, as much of the book is description of visuals that may not resonate with a reader who is unfamiliar with British vehicular terminology. Cronenberg maintains the rhythm and dreamlike quality of the book, but the addition of visuals makes the leap to sexuality easier to accept.

In short, I absolutely loved this book, but I think its real quality lays in the discussions it provokes, not what's actually on the page. I feel that perhaps the greatest justice it's received is its molding into a beautiful film by a man who has never compromised vision to maintain "good taste." I would have to recommend the movie over the book, and then recommend the book for people who are interested in further exploring the topic.

Fables: Storybook Love by Bill Willingham

2007-09-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Despite continuous reading, this blog always slows down when it's time for me to review a comic.

Without the vernacular and history of a comic book reader, I'm left with vapid and basically meaningless statements, which amount to no more than plot summary.

Storybook Love was wonderful. There is clever usage of Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, but the real meat of it is the developing relationship between Snow White and Bigby Wolf. Bigby's dialogue to White in the woods is the most romantic thing you could imagine coming from a giant wolf's mouth. Very creative and one of the first emotionally-charged speeches so far.

The opening story about Jack of all Trades is well-drawn and interesting: it reeks folklore, which I believe it's supposed to. Absolutely wonderful. Reading this first section of the comic in the store is what made me decide to go ahead and buy.

This is the volume where Willingham first pulls together a number of the established Fablisms (so to speak) into something truly unique. The interactions between city Fables and country Fables become more complex and less sophomoric than the relationships outlined in Animal Farm.

What I am enjoying the most about this series so far is the willingness to be physically brutal. This where the real power of "real-life fairy tales" comes into play. Most of our fairy tales have been sanitized by Disney and Mother Goose, their brutal aspects written out or drastically modified. What might be initially called a "reinvention" of fairy tales in the Fables series is actually closer to a revival. Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away - that concept is abolished in favor of, Right here, in this city, just below your noses. The gruesome aspects of each story are presented in a way that would make the Grimm brothers proud.

The stupid bookstore doesn't have Volume 4, March of the Wooden Soldiers, but I plan to track it down soon. Hopefully, my insights will improve (at least in relation to this particular series).

Oh, I almost forgot. Storybook Love gives us the first instance of a human being (journalist, naturally) investigating the Fables. If that isn't a hook, I don't know what is.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2007-08-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

My first encounter with McCarthy was Blood Meridian, which I read about two years ago for a fabulous class taught by Professor Bishop. It is one of the relatively few fictional works that have transcended the classroom and ended up on my bookshelf. Despite growing up in California, surrounding by the mythos of the Wild West, his take on the western landscape and man's violent drive toward the Pacific was intoxicating. I would say that I never understood the emotional forces, as divorced from the historical understanding of Manifest Destiny until I read Meridian.

With The Road, McCarthy further displays his ability to project the most basic human emotions against the most complicated moral and geographical backgrounds. He makes two wise choices, which allow his novel to accomplish the level of brilliance. The first is that he focuses the plot on two characters, narrowing the scope of an entire world down to the existence and relation of people who could be seen as opposites. These two characters are father and son, although they never receive those names from the author: they are the man, and the boy.

This is a device that I have enjoyed since I was very young. The first time it impressed me was in Nicolas Roeg's film Walkabout. I remember being stunned when the credits began to roll and I realized I had been moved to tears by nameless characters. Archetypes are generally considered the terrain of ancient and Classical era literature, but they are almost more powerful when placed in an era indoctrinated with the notion of individualism. It can serve to remind us that we are each a type of some kind, even if that type is only "father" or "son."

The second choice I find conducive to brilliance is the ambiguity of the past. The characters are wandering a wasteland. Indeed, the novel's synopsis refers to a post-apocalyptic landscape. Most approaches to apocalypse in popular culture these days are either strong socio-political statements about specific human faults, or a Dionysian reveling in such faults. Still others are funny. But they all give us explanations of not only what happened, but how it happened.

McCarthy doesn't stoop to this level. His interest is not what happened, but what continues to happen, and what connects the past to the present. Despite apocalypse, father-son love continues. It finds a form, even among trees covered with ash and a never-ending dust. His story is most moving not in its descriptions of decrepit automobiles, dilapidated homes, or abandoned gas stations. Nor in the protagonists' encounters with decaying corpses, blind drifters, or mutilated victims of some undefined band of "bad guys." It is in the perilous lives of the man and boy. These external elements only moved me when they threatened the continuation of the pair, either by separation or physical harm. Their love is impractical and desperately painful at times, but psychologically necessary, like so much of human emotion.

McCarthy doesn't skimp on the topographically descriptives, though. If I had stopped to find a dictionary every time he used a noun I had never heard before in order to set an outdoor scene, I would never have finished the damn thing. Although this could be frustrating to me at times, it was never repetitive and only served to enforce the authenticity of his world. As well as remind me to learn more tangible nouns, as opposed to these abstractions I'm well-versed in.

The Road is unrelenting. There are no chapter breaks, just larger spaces in between paragraphs. Like one might imagine a post-apocalyptic world, little is known and even less is stable, predictable, or happy. There are definite moments of sweetness, but they only tease you, glittering like embers threatening to go out at any moment. Despite knowing that fires always turn to embers and embers to ashes, I muscled through the psychological torment just so I could catch a few glimpses of light. Given the condition of his characters, I think McCarthy is trying to show the reader that this drive to find the smallest glints of happiness, despite the horror they reflect against, is what makes us human.

Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons

2007-08-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

I've had a long time to sit on this book - my life got really busy in between reading it and having a chance to write about it. I'm very glad I had this time to reflect, because my initial impression of this "American Dream" was not very strong.

I felt that the characterization of the protagonist was too simple to be moving - she seemed like such a stereotype that it was difficult to think of her as anything other than a vehicle for some kind of message or symbolism. And if that was intentional, then any intended message or symbolism was unnecessarily muddled or disappointingly simplistic.

But then! I had time to think. I was expecting this novel to make political statements about the America that we live in, and when I found that the plot took the reader further and further from reality, I didn't understand the point. The protagonist doesn't fight for any large political ideals resembling revolution. She's very focused on her individual survival and is sporadically invested in the well-being of her family back in the ghetto. She's so beaten-down with trauma and hypocrisy that she thinks and speaks in short phrases connected by only a thread.

There is a strong and unflinching look into the upper workings of politics, evidenced by a popular president whose secret service has a compromised loyalty and spies on him while keeping him unavoidably supplied with alcohol during times of political crisis. The swaying of popular opinion and the ability to manipulate it is subtly handled in the public's acceptance of a tyrannical figure, and then his opposite, and then the tyrant again.

There are fun alternate history and science fiction aspects to this novel. A warring America with inner city troubles is exaggerated past the point of reality, and it's important to remember that this is, in fact, an alternate history and not a direct commentary on our own reality. I neglected to focus on this fact, and completely missed what I now believe to be the point of this novel.

In this twisted reality, our hero (have I mentioned her name yet? It's Martha Washington) acts in ways that rarely resemble a political hero's methods. She fights constantly, both in and out of the military's good graces. She's branded early on by a superior officer who wants to keep her a secret - this is the main conflict that makes us like her in her adult phase. As a child, she's overachieving and subject to horror, which makes her easily sympathetic. However, she grows into a more physically than intellectually reactive adult, and I couldn't help but feel as though her mental capacity took a backseat to combat scenes.

Martha acts in defense of a government that anyone in Bush-era America would outright condemn, but she's our hero. The point may be that every era, every regime, breeds its defenders and its heroes - that the definitions of honor and loyalty are dependent upon your historical or political position.

All this serious talk aside, this book is a fun read. There are physically-deformed children who are psychically connected to both people and machines. There's an Apache war chief who fuels a really interesting subplot about reparations. There are interspersed sections of magazine and newspaper articles that flesh out the alternate reality. It's a very well put-together book. Next time, I'll try to read it when I'm not in the hospital on pain medication. I'm sure that if you do so, you'll find this an intriguing story.

Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? by Liz Prince

2007-07-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

Can you tell I've been in a comic shop recently? This is a short collection of two-to-four panel rough drawing cartoons detailing the inner workings of Prince's relationship with her boyfriend. And by "inner workings," I don't mean emotional ins-and-outs, cry fests, or gossip. I mean small, almost always tender, moments between two individuals. I opened the book to a random page, loved what I read, and immediately bought the book. It took less than half an hour to read all of the comics, and I wish there were more. The thing is, I'm living the ones that haven't been written.

So much of this book is familiar that I feel bad I didn't write it myself. At once, I feel relieved that there are other people out there having the most inane relationships moments, and I also feel jealous that my relationship isn't unique in that way. Here are the few sample comics I could find online, with commentary:

How real is this moment? It speaks to all kinds of things - the joy of giving mixed with the love of celebrating special days. That mixture of Liz's annoyance and Kevin's joy is so gorgeously accurate. It's not that funny, though, unless you recognize the situation from your own life. Next!

Now we're in the realm of cute, while still real! The comfortable way they're lying there should be familiar to anyone in love, and the silly little comments are hopefully familiar to everyone. This particular comic points to a physical intimacy to extends beyond sex. Here are two people so comfortable with not only their own bodies, but their bodies together, that they can refer to nipples without being crass or sexual, but just sweet and witty. Even when we cuddle, we're sexual beings. And here is the last one:

Okay, so my boyfriend's never done this to me, but I could imagine him doing so, and I know my reaction would be exactly the same. It makes me laugh. There is another comic that shows bathroom behavior I have engaged in. Liz pees in the toilet and tells Kevin, "I saved it, so you can pee in my pee," and he responds with, "Yay!"

The book isn't filled with scatology, though - don't worry. The frank attitude toward shared bathroom moments and flatulence is bitingly honest instead of frathouse comedy. And these are perhaps the most intimate comics. I can think of at least one person I know who would be turned off by this comic because of those moments, but they are the same ones that turn me right onto it. No one talks about intimacy like this: peeing in the same toilet as a kind of romance, cold nipples poking you blind as an extension of physical comfortability, and so forth. But that kind of intimacy exists. If it bothers you, there is plenty of "safe" cuddling-in-bed comics to overwhelm the very few bathroom-related ones.

One reviewer I read online said that the problem with this comic is that the moments seem as though they could only belong to this particular couple. Well, I'd like to punch that guy in the face, because more than one moment of my relationship that I thought was as private as private got was in this book.

So, I guess that makes me biased when I say that this book is completely infectious and almost entirely accurate. If you think I'm wrong, that's fine. But recommending that you read it is like asking you to peek through a little window to my own relationship. So that's kind of weird. Is there a way you could read and love this book without violating my privacy? Thanks. It's worth it.

1602 by Neil Gaiman

2007-07-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

Whoops. I made a mistake.

I read 1602 without even a fundamental understanding of Marvel characters. I know it was a mistake, but the fact is that someone lent me this book and I couldn't bloody well hold on to the thing for a year while I immersed myself in the Universe de Marvel. I just had to plow through it in less than a week and hope that I got something out of it.

And I did. I'm not sure what it was, though. The plot was confusing, because so much of the action was character-based and I understood so little of the characters. The premise is quite brilliant, though, and many times I felt I was giving the book a disservice by reading it (unfamiliar with the characters as I was).

There is definitely the feeling that something good is going on, though. The artwork is just beautiful - the drawings of Queen Elizabeth in particular. The visual components alone are worth picking the book up. The writing, when it wasn't knee-deep in something I couldn't understand, was fluid and realistic.

What I was familiar with was joyful. The Fantastic Four's origin story was wonderful, Peter Parker was a bit of a tease but still fun, the Phoenix story retelling was intriguing, and the reincarnation of Captain America as a Native American is nothing short of inspired.

I'm still finding my feet when it comes to any sort of graphic novel. I probably made a mistake by starting with Watchmen, which I'm only going to have so long to adore before it's cut to pieces in a movie. It was so excellent that I don't want to see it in a movie, the format perfectly fit the material. But this isn't a post about Watchmen.

If I owned 1602 I would lend it to someone who is more familiar with Marvel than I am, and I am sure they would enjoy it, if they have any love for innovation or alternate history. I would recommend it to my father, if his knowledge of comic book characters is what I think it is.

Sorry, what I have to say about these comics isn't very insightful. I'm just more comfortable and familiar with the standard fiction genre, the one with paragraphs instead of panels. Not to say I'm abandoning graphic novels; in fact, I enjoy them very much. I just, in good conscience, pretend to be an expert on them the way I can with general fiction.

I am, however, an expert on what I like, and I liked the parts of 1602 that I could understand, which leads me to believe that the other parts are just as, if not more, likable. At least to someone who can appreciate them.

Fables: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham

2007-07-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

Here we go.

The concept is starting to pick up steam here, as the author introduces a political aspect to the fable world. Although "the farm" is only mentioned in passing in Volume 1, it is the main setting in this volume. By the end of Exile, we're familiar with the human fables living in New York city, and now we learn details about the farm upstate where all of the non-human fables are sent/forced/able to live. This group would include the Jungle Book characters, the Three Little Pigs, giants, dragons, and so forth.

As the title implies, there is a political upset in the works. Although the farm is well-tended, the animals are beginning to feel as though they are living in a prison. A plan to take over the city-headquarters is underway and Snow White steps right in the middle of it during her annual visit.

This is a far more interesting book than the first one. We get some minor action back in the city, but almost everything is focused on just the farm and its animals. The political rhetoric is appealing and familiar, though. It isn't anything you haven't heard before: they won't accept us because we're different but we'll show them. That kind of thing.

Animal Farm gives the Fables series a chance to show us for the first time the characters' capacities for violence. This makes for some great paneling, and for completely new visions of The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, and so forth. Their threats are very real, and there are a number of surprises in the plot.

Again, this installments suffers in ways similar to the first one: the idea is interesting, but there isn't nearly enough expansion on it. The hope is that Willingham has something much grander in the works, and that these early volumes are planting seeds for more complicated action down the line.

Personally, I found the plot too straight-forward. Characters are developing slowly so, for the time being, their actions aren't very surprising or enlightening. Snow White does use this plot line to prove that she's bad ass, if a bit of a crybaby at times. If you were wondering why she would be the one in charge of organizing the other fables, this book gives you a few examples of why she's perfect for the job.

Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed. But that might not be necessary. To keep a series running, you don't have to constantly impress, you just need to constantly hint that whatever it is the last volume left to be desired will show up in the next volume. Because the premise is just so interesting, this series succeeds. Although I haven't purchased it yet, the third volume is somewhere on my list. Unfortunately, there is a good chance I won't actually get to it, precisely because I've been let down twice in a row now. Third time's a charm, I guess. And if it isn't, I may quit. It's possible I'm not cut out for long-running series.

Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham

2007-07-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

From Dawn to Decadence is an intensely heavy read, so for spots of lightness I decided to read a few graphic novels. This was the first.

Undoubtedly, this comic has a great premise. Fairy tale characters (ranging from Snow White to Jungle Book characters) are exiles in modern-day New York. They're immortal, sort of, and are living in the shadow of an unspecified adversarial attack on their homelands. Snow White is essentially the mayor of these people, at least in the city. The Big Bad Wolf is Bigby Wolf, the detective. Bluebeard is there, and so are Beauty and the Beast and Little Boy Blue, and so forth.

The first installment serves to introduce us to the characters through the disappearance and possible murder of Rose Red (Snow White's sister). This world provides us with all sorts of interesting side notes. Beauty and Beast need marriage counseling, because when Beauty loves Beast less than usual, he becomes more physically beastly than usual. A good twist on the old concept.

Still, this comic left something to be desired. By the last page, it felt as though the story had only gotten started. It was disappointing. Bigby's detective skills are promising, and the fact that any actions "before the exile" aren't supposed to be recognized leads to some difficulties. Based on fairy tales, we know what certain characters' traits are, but those exact tales can't be used in choosing suspects.

The artwork is good, especially the chapter titles. The writing, however, is a little simple. The dialogue is heavy with exposition and hopefully this is only a symptom of the first installments.

There's a very good idea hiding within this comic, but its possibilities aren't realized here. If you're interested, it would be best to read from the beginning (as it usually is), but don't expect to be blown away.

I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

2007-07-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

"For all its obsessive analysis, Denis's Biggest Brain had neglected to consider two relevant facts. Big Brains often have this problem: Albert Einstein was said to be so absentminded that he once brushed his teeth with a power drill. But even Einstein (who, according to geek mythology, bagged Marilyn Monroe) would not have overlooked these facts; even Einstein's brain, pickling in a jar at Princeton, would be able to grasp the infinitudinous import of these two simple facts, which now hung over Denis's huge head like a sword of Damocles -- or to the non-honors graduates, like a sick fart.

The two incontrovertible, insurmountable, damn sad facts were these:

Beth Cooper was the head cheerleader;

Denis Cooverman was captain of the debate team."

This may not be the most groundbreaking book you can read, but it is certainly one of the most likable. The hardcover shows a drawing of a scared, excited, sweating, generously nervous guy with a thought bubble declaring, in capital letters, "I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER." The capitals are just a font choice, a very appropriate one.

It's a cliche, to be sure: the debate team captain and all-around science-geek has had a long-standing crush on the head cheerleader and most popular girl in school, whom he has sat behind in nearly all of his classes. The book opens with his, Denis's, graduation speech, wherein he declares the title of the book. The plot develops from there.

The action develops dramatically and quickly. The more violent scenes are truly outrageous and very effective - you worry for the character at the same time you know he's going to be fine. The relationships between the characters move at the perfect pace for teenagers, and reminds me of how much, or little, it took to feel connected to a peer at that age.

Doyle really does cover every stop along the way: nerdy protagonist with hapless best friend and helpless love for beautiful girl who barely knows he's alive. Drinking, drugs, sex, violence, reckless driving, and so forth, ensue. There's even a wonderfully tiny subplot focused on Denis's parents.

This novel is the literary equivalent of film's love for "teen comedy" ala John Hughes. It's the golden age of 80s teenage-representation, but this time in print. True to its genre, the book starts each chapter with a simple quote from well-known cinematic teenagers such as Max Fischer and Lloyd Dobler. It's a simple, easy, safe structure, but unless you have green criticism coursing through your veins, you'll love it anyway.

One thing this book gives you that an 80s movie has thus failed to is our protagonist's inner dialogue. Of course, we have Bueller's mugging at the camera and whatnot, but that's different from what we get here. We have a nice parallel between what Denis is actually thinking (say, calculating cancer statistics while watching Beth light a cigarette) and what he says ("I actually don't know any cancer statistics"). Although you could get a sense of such a personality on the screen, there's something very realistic about having it reinforced scene by scene. The reader understands just how smart Denis is, and just how integrated into his life learning is. He is instantly more than just a geek to the reader.

I could go on, but it's useless. Cooper is perfect (allow me to stress perfect) in what it does.

Capturing high school life can be difficult to do. Especially for someone like me (like many of us), because I never felt as though the 80s movies applied to my teenage experience. Not ever remotely. This book, however, looking back on it after a week, did an excellent job. Doyle's treatment of teenage music, culture, sociology, and mentality is spot-on. I wouldn't say that I identify with any one character, not even the main one who shares my name, but the book is played by an ensemble cast. Take all those characters together, along with the jokes that you wouldn't necessarily realize are jokes if you're still in high school yourself, and I'm in there between those two covers. We're all in there.

Ask the Dust by John Fante

2007-07-09T02:21:00.000-07:00

This novel was hypnotizing. I don't mean that the cover has swirls reminiscent of the snake's eyes in The Jungle Book; I mean that the style and language is deliriously overpowering.

As far as writing about writers goes, Fante keeps it firmly in the realm of everyday life - when his protagonist writes, it is described as simply as when he walks. It is refreshing for an author to describe writing matter-of-factly, instead of addressing the art as though it is a lofty impossible thing, only possible locked away in solitude or under the influence of various drugs.

I grew up in the outskirts of Los Angeles, in the "flat plain" of the San Fernando Valley. Regardless, I've always felt close to the culture and history of Los Angeles proper. I have a soft spot for it, so forgive me. Fante's descriptions of Los Angeles are beautiful, especially when they are directed at the less beautiful aspects of the city and its people.

One reviewer of this book said that it was definitely not recommended reading for the young, and even though I am relatively young, I would agree with this statement. I first read this book about nine or ten years ago and, honestly, I didn't know what all the fuss was about. I simply failed to understand its psychological nuances. Now that I am much closer to the protagonist's age, his thoughts, moods, delusions, and hopes are all more understandable, more realistic, and more heartbreaking than they possibly could have been while I still lived under my parents' roof.

Fante's main character, Arturo Bandini, is a writer who is struggling more in the sense of affording food than coming up with ideas. He has a proper amount of contradiction in his personality. I feel that too many characters are without internal conflict, and it's hard to identify with people who always seem to feel one way all the time. Bandini vacillates between delusions of grandeur and self-loathing, love and hate for his culture, simple enjoyment of Los Angeles and melancholy for its people. The palm trees that are so surprisingly gorgeous that he simply must sit underneath them and nap all afternoon, are, in a later chapter, sadly trapped in concrete while they suffocate under dust and car exhaust. Only sometimes does Bandini fully realize the contradictions in his behavior and opinions, and his inability or unwillingness to synthesize the two sides is perhaps the most human thing about him.

Don't trust the synopsis on the back of the book - if you pick up the Harper Perennial edition, it will mislead you greatly.

What might be most notable for the "cool" young reader is that Charles Bukowski referred to Fante as "my god." There is at least one poem by ol Buk about Fante's bout with diabetes - the Harper edition contains this poem in the back. It's beautiful. You can see the influence that Fante's direct style had on Bukowski, but at no point does the knowledge of Bukowski's imminent emergence overshadow the power of Fante's writing.

Any man who describes the ground during an earthquake as "carpet over oil," is okay in my book. What is dangerous about this novel is that Fante makes writing one seem positively easy. While that might make too many amateurs jump into the pool of literature, I can't help but admit that he is the first writer in a long time (if not ever) who has made me feel as though I must take the plunge myself.

Highly recommended, especially for Los Angeles residents or natives. Or, I suppose, anyone who likes to read. The Los Angeles (do not read "Hollywood") aspect of the book is negligible unless you are directly familiar with or nostalgic for the landscapes, which I am. I might actually take a break from fiction for awhile, so that Dust can cast its shadow a little longer.

Woe is I by Patricia T. O'Conner

2007-07-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

The subtitle for this book is, "The Grammaphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English." It might surprise you to read that my self-definition as "a grammar Nazi" has been, until now, a gross mislabeling. I can't imagine a time when I felt as racked with grammatical paranoia as I do now. It has taken me five minutes to write the preceding sentences; I normally typed words at the speed of thought.

You may be worried now. "Her tendency to correct my grammar in public will surely increase," you are saying.

Oh, it will. It certainly will. The only difference is that I have suddenly become aware of my glass house. This book is the bird shit that landed on my roof, proving to me (once and for all) that I am a fallible writer. To be more precise, I should say that it has proven my laziness and carelessness. Once I owned a computer with an electronic dictionary built in to the desktop, I began to double-check my spelling and diction on a frequent basis. Now I have another, more powerful reference.

O'Conner's voice in this book is very strong. It is what saves Woe is I from reading like any other grammar handbook. Listing outdated or misused words is terrifying because her commentary is fiery and staunch.

If you care about how you come across in your writing, you should probably pick up this book or a book very similar to it. Of course, you can't absorb every piece of advice overnight, but small things will sink in right away.

While reading, I alternated between feeling very smart and very foolish. Many distinctions I needed no help on. I was aware that a "split infinitive" was a myth, and that "it's" and "its" mean different things. For every five examples that made me feel as though I didn't need this book, there was one that made me feel as though I need ten of these books.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book. O'Conner's examples are fun if only because they use character names from popular fiction and film. Her love of the English language and its ability to evolve saves her from dismissal as a fussy school marm. She attacks many such dramatic English teachers and sets the bar not higher, not lower, but on an entirely different apparatus.

I plan to read this book repeatedly. It is easy to take one chapter out of context and cull only information about commas or adjectives. I especially enjoyed the list of cliched phrases and misunderstood rules.

However, I would certainly not recommend reading this book while you are in school. Paranoia about your grammar is one thing when all you do is blog (O'Conner would disagree, actually), and quite another when your writing is going to be immediately visible to someone who will review it and rank it among other examples. If you consider yourself literate, this book will hurt your feelings. But it's just trying to help.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) by Kurt Vonnegut

2007-06-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

It feels redundant to review anything by Vonnegut. Some of my contemporaries seem to think they should avoid seeming dull or pleasant by finding something to critique even within those things that they love. My friends, I am not one of those people. An open mind goes completely out the window when I encounter a work by someone I already like. I hate the objectivist bias against bias! I'm biased, dammit, for better or worse!

When I love something, or someone, I love them. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. Granted, I haven't read everything he's written, but the novels I have read combined with the opinion pieces I've read are enough for me to enjoy the man's writing like I would a friend's. It may sound presumptuous to go about referring to Vonnegut as my friend, but this is the feeling one gets after reading a personal collection such as Wampeters. It is difficult to dislike someone who is so modest, simple, and surprised at his own success.

This collection includes speeches, book reviews, musings, a Playboy interview, and an unfinished screenplay. I found his review of Hunter S. Thompson to be particularly intriguing, as I admire both authors. In his introduction, Vonnegut claims to have arranged the materials in chronological order, to the best of this ability, and this attempt shines through. One can chart his movements in and out of pessimism, gentle Christianity, sadness, hypocrisy, and humor, and yet simultaneously see which parts of him have always remained the same. It is in this sense that I say reading this book makes Vonnegut like a friend to you. He has peaks and valleys, but the same essential man, the one who yearns for an American "extended family" persists throughout episodes of despair and elation.

Vonnegut, is anything, is perhaps too compassionate for me. Underneath his political and social critiques, he is a lover of man and a defender of the shy and stupid. He stands up for what is most pitiful in man, and in many ways I envy his apparent ability to reconcile ambivalence toward humanity. Reconcile may be too strong a word, as he does periodically mention his struggle to overlook the unhappiness of life in favor of the beautiful. But facing up to the ambivalence is noble enough.

In short, if you are already a Vonnegut fan, this book is pay dirt. If you're not a Vonnegut fan, hopefully this will give you a better opinion of the man, if not his fiction. If you're never read anything Vonnegut has ever touched, ever, this wouldn't be a bad introduction. Even though I try to be a properly critical member of my generation, the whimsy of Vonnegut's life has completely, utterly, stupidly won me over.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

2007-06-16T23:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished this book tonight, while sitting in a mall food court awaiting the return of my movie-going partner from the bathroom. A really crowded place is a good location for reading, because the isolating and individual nature of reading is highlighted.

But anyway. I really enjoyed this book, probably more than I enjoyed Catcher. It's important to note that this was not conceived as a cohesive book, or at least it wasn't written all at the same time under that notion. The "Franny" section was published in The New Yorker in 1955, the "Zooey" half in the same publication two years later.

There is a heavy amount of religious talk in this book, especially the second half. This is the kind of thing that can usually make me uncomfortable when reading. Although I consider myself a spiritual person, I resist using the language or concepts of organized religion. I think organization might be the problem. So, when Franny gets all nutso about The Jesus Prayer and Zooey starts in critiquing her about it, I was afraid of being thrown into the middle of a theological debate concerning the nature of God.

In a way, I was. However, so much of the discussion between the two characters (if you can really call it discussion) had more to do with ego and one's place in, and attitude toward, the world that the whole thing can be easily secularized and absorbed that way.

The novel is particularly claustrophobic, with only a few sets and four characters given spoken dialogue. The other voices that feature heavily in the story are from other texts - an effective technique for a writer to use. We encounter characters through their letters, or collections of quotations they kept around, etc. As an avid reader and quote-collector, this was very appealing to me.

I believe there are character arcs in this story, but they are just the way such arcs should be - subtle. Nothing is dramatically toppled over here. As the author says about the second half, it's like a written home movie.

I don't have a big overall statement to make about this book, since I just finished reading it and it hasn't sunk into my regular life, yet. But I definitely enjoyed it. I would recommend reading it in as few chunks as possible - it is short and quick to read, without a lot of places and people to keep track of, and there are few section breaks. I always regretted having to set it down in the middle of an argument that two of the characters were having. Salinger did a great job of capturing the rhythm and pitch of a family argument. His portrayal of the mother is particularly, well, motherly. Despite Bessie's specific character, she has quirks that are present in any mother, and reading them so succinctly put was a joy.

If you are an overly intellectual and troubled 20-something, this book may seem like something of a talking-to. But that's not a bad thing - Zooey critiques while he loves, and even if you're not attempting a Jesus Prayer, the painful collision of his love and criticism is moving and sweet and real.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

2007-06-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

In a 1949 letter to George Orwell, Huxley defends the legitimacy of his future-world against 1984's by emphasizing the importance of efficiency in today's society. Orwell's nightmare government would waste far too much energy keeping their boot on the face of the lower classes, whereas Huxley's government spends their resources slowly training each individual to accept their lot in the caste system.

I've read 1984 twice, and to this day there are only two things about it that have really stuck with me. One is the mere image of a man hunched over a small table writing furiously, and the other is Orwell's extensive footnote on the development of “doublespeak.” I remember the presence of the journal making 1984 a very psychological experience: Freud would be proud of the revelations the protagonist has concerning his own thoughts. The concept of “doublespeak” is so insightful that I don't doubt our politicians have always engaged in it. Orwell's textbook description of the details of what might be called both a dialect and a distinct psychology is absolutely wonderful. I could read it a million times over.

Now, with the requisite comparison out of the way, let me say that I might be more of a Brave New World kind of person. The plot, granted, is less bombastic. You are thrown a number of different characters, but remain unsure who the plot will focus on and towards what ends. In a way, this is a shame. Huxley demonstrates, specifically through Bernard, his ability to put a fine point on a complicated emotion. Each character encounters some amount of confusion or bewilderment, as they are heavily conditioned to accept a world that some core of their being is opposed to. One could tease this out into a discussion of the philosophical “linguistic turn” quite easily: how do we describe our defection from society when society is the sole provider of our language?

In Huxley's hyper-industrial world, the answer is Shakespeare, or at least what the literary arts stand for. Reading and thinking are consistently toted as unproductive and pointless, and books of poetry and fiction have slowly been phased out of society. In some way, this story is about an artist himself. This is a subtle notion, one that didn't occur to me until the very last chapter of the book.

The overwhelming degree to which Huxley's upper classes have learned to control all classes (including their own) is frightening, but presented almost fairly. Their philosophy is standard to any aficionado of dark-future science fiction: emotion is the root of human problems, we must curtail or eliminate it. This goes far more interesting and complex places than merely addicting the population to an uber-Prozac. Children are conditioned throughout their youth in a number of different ways, as well as physically-manipulated in infancy to reinforce their social caste in their bodies. A numbing narcotic of some sort is provided to the different castes in different ways, ensuring that the lower classes complete their work and the upper classes avoid critical thinking.

There are many more details to Huxley's vision of control, but listing them here (and I would certainly need to list them) would ruin their surprise and, I think, realism. Like any book about the future written in the past, there are possibilities that have gone unaccounted for. Take it at face value, give it the benefit of the doubt and you won't be disappointed. Remember that the real gist of this book is in the details of the power structure – the characters and the plot don't really do much. They exist as portals to flesh out the specifics of the ruling class' development and philosophy, including the wide range of human individuals it affects. If anything, read this book so that you can see all how many people it has influenced – especially in cinema.

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin

2007-06-12T00:06:00.001-07:00

I'm madly in love with this book. First of all, look at the cover.

He's the Walt Whitman of 70s comedy. Most of these stories are more whimsy than they are laugh out loud funny, but several are absolute delights. His poetry parodies are cute, but poetry is already such a joke that it's not very difficult to make fun of. One or two of his false poems walk the irony line on one foot, leading me to consider turning in his work to an online poetry publisher, just to see.

The title story, "Cruel Shoes," is just flat-out hilarious, with a nice dash of consumer-criticism thrown in. The shoes themselves are, if you're wondering, quite cruel. My other favorites include "Women Without Bones," "The Nervous Father," "Serious Dogs," and "The Bohemians."

They are all clever, and they are all short. I am tempted to cut and paste one of them, but I wouldn't know which one. And then one would lead to another. If you like Steve Martin, which it seems not everyone does (these days), you need to go back to the originals. Don't think that you're some kind of expert because you read Shopgirl or Pure Drivel. Get real, get original. This was comedy at its most fun and purposeless. What is the point of any of these stories? You don't really know. You just get the feeling they brought a smirk to his face.

You could count the punchlines in this book on one hand, and you probably wouldn't have to use the whole thing. It's a treat despite its age (a ripe old thirty). If you're not convinced, I will gladly type up a story or two. Or, if you're too lazy to ask, just look at the cover again. Go on, look at it. Tell me you don't wish you looked that cool.

Failed States by Noam Chomsky

2007-06-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

So, Cuckoo's Nest made me cry so much that I had to take in some light reading. Ha! But no, I'm not kidding. Literature hits me heavily, so I often turn to non-fiction, preferably essays, to lighten the emotional toll. I'm weird like that.

My introduction to Chomsky was Imperial Ambitions, which was a collected series of interviews. Also, it was much easier to read because the citations were all verbal references, and not big chunks of quoted text in the middle of what I thought was a sentence, somewhere up there, I think, yeah. What I'm trying to say is, States is dense. I expected dense reading, however, which is why I am going through this book one chapter at a time.

Thus far, I have read the first chapter, and I already feel a sense of helpless desperation. Political essays can do this to me, but I read them, anyway. I'm a very masochistic bookworm. Chomsky's logic is so overwhelming that it almost feels like you shouldn't even read the book - just agree with him.

I have no background in politics, political systems, history, etc etc. All I know is what I've seen, as a very humble layperson. I basically believe anything anyone says to me about politics until someone else comes along to tell me otherwise. I don't become vehement one way or the other, I just sit and listen and try to process things upwards out. By that I mean, I pick and choose which political issues are important to me when they actually breach into my personal life. Thus, I haven't delved into the issue of the death penalty, but I have into the issue of abortion. Marijuana use, yes. Gun control, yes. International taxes, not so much. And so forth.

With that in mind, I can't say whether or not Chomsky is convincing or accurate. I can say that he is very authoritative. He doesn't backtrack. He just relentlessly provides detail after detail outlining the ways in which America fits its own definition of a "rogue state."

Other countries aren't off the hook, though. Their collusions with us and with each other are also mentioned, as historical examples or counterexamples to American policy. I am keeping an ear out for who I don't hear him complain about, because that is where I want to be (although, they probably have their own problems).

I suppose I should get into his ideas about linguistics, because that seems so much more obviously my style. As it is, I like reading what he has to say about politics, even when I have to read each paragraph really really slowly.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

2007-06-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

I absolutely adored this book. It's the best thing I've read in a really long time, and I wish I had this blog going while I was in the midst of reading it, because it was changing my life.

It's almost impossible to mention the book without mentioning the film, which is such a classic. I saw the film a few years too young - I spent half an hour crying after it was over, but if you had asked me at the time, I wouldn't have been able to explain why. I could explain why, now, but the explanation would be all talk and symbolism and politics. There remains no way to properly communicate the raw emotion of this story.

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to stop thinking of Nicholson while reading this, but Kesey's description of both McMurphy's and the other characters' physicality is so sparse and visual that Nicholson doesn't stand a chance.

In case you don't know, the book is narrated first person by "Chief." This is an excellent move, since you can see the narrator's illness through his own words, even if he can't see it. It's a very effective style, because you're also able to interpret the sanity to his delusions. To some extent, it leaves you wondering if Chief isn't insane so much as some kind of poet.

This is the last book I've read that made me weep. Not just the typical end-of-the-novel oh boo-hoo thing, but also in joy at times. Wonderful crests in the story and characters.

Don't buy the Signet small paperback copy of this book - the back cover synopsis ruins the ending, and there were a ton of typos in mine. Aside from sloppy publishing, I would say that this book is perfect. Kesey ascribes characteristics to mental patients that we should all be wise enough to see in ourselves - at first you're afraid of the asylum's inside, and then you can see that the asylum is everywhere.

I know that's a trite ending point, but there is no way to reformulate this novel without sounding trite. The ideas are basic, sanity vs. madness, chaos vs. order, freedom vs. control, The Will, etc. Classic stuff. But this is a classic in the same way that Hamlet is. Beyond being a good piece of literature for its time, Cuckoo's Nest is bound to be an excellent piece of literature for much time to come.

A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin

2007-06-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

I usually don't read two works by the same author back-to-back. I find it can complicate my opinions, as well as my memories, of what I've read. One summer, I read nothing but Michael Crichton books (because I was twelve), and I can't tease out the events in them at all. It just felt like reading Crichton's diary.

It's appropriate that I apply this idea to Nin, because she has written a famous erotic diary. At this point, I'm not particularly interested in reading it, mostly because of my reaction to Spy. I do know, however, that I will end up reading it, anyway.

It was a mistake to read Spy right after I was so thoroughly impressed by Birds. I can tell the book is well-written, but I would have been much more in love with it had I read it one, or even two, years ago. I used to love characters that dealt with deception and jealousy, and now I find those topics much less intriguing. Wait, that's not quite accurate. What I mean is, I demand a progressive approach to those ideas, instead of reformulating old ground.

Nin does formulate new ground here, almost fifty years after Spy was published. The protagonist is a woman who engages in promiscuity "like a man." She is deceptive to her husband and partners, but what she goes through is too complex to be contained in a traditional faithful/unfaithful framework. It is tempting to say that she is being faithful to herself, but even that is questionable, as she never maintains one attitude toward her behavior for very long.

What is certain is that engaging lovers other than her husband is compulsive, despite her love for him. She agonizes over her desire to confess her misdeeds, knowing that such a confession would elicit forgiveness from her husband. However, she knows he would only forgive her while simultaneously making her promise to remain faithful. She is incapable of keeping such a promise.

At first, I held this narrative at arm's length. For the past year, I have been in a sexually open relationship - one in which I am the partner who primarily seeks other partners. The single most important aspect of such openness is honesty, and the protagonist's inability to be honest with her husband (not as a fault of personality, but of circumstance) was both painful and irritating to read about.

What was most easy to identify with was her ability to find different kinds of love and eroticism with different people. She describes herself as an actress worried about losing track of the many parts she plays. In fact, the excuse she uses when she sees other men is that she has been given a role in a stage play being produced out of town.

At times, the descriptions became very abstract. This was charming in the small doses of Birds, but harder to stomach over an extended narrative. I felt myself wanting to see more "action," as it were, instead of treading over emotional ground I'm well-familiar with.

The part of the novel that stayed with me the most is Sabina's ruminations after spending a night with one of her other lovers. Allow me to quote:

"Without any warmth of the heart, as a man could, she had enjoyed a stranger.

And then she remembered what she had heard men say: 'Then I wanted to leave.'

She gazed at the stranger lying naked beside her and saw him as a statue she did not want to touch again. As a statue he lay far from her, strange to her, and there welled in her something resembling anger, regret, almost a desire to take this gift of herself back, to efface all traces of it, to banish it from her body. She wanted to become swiftly and cleanly detached from him, to disentangle and unmingle what had been fused for a moment, their breaths, skins, exhalations, and body's essences."

This is a wonderful passage, and the scene only improves as she goes on to describe the almost eerie experience of being able to see hairbrushes and perfume bottles, which obviously belong to some other woman, in his bathroom without feeling any jealousy.

I wonder if this is the novel that a compulsively cheating man would write if he had the emotional vocabulary of a woman. In that context, this book can help redefine what is appropriate or expected behavior for either gender. Her behavior is ostensibly the same, but the world of the novel is so rich with explanation and empathy. Also, you can explore the exciting tangent of where love and sex separate, and where they overlap. For that matter, the very nature of love itself is in danger, as Nin distinguishes between stable, domestic love, and unpredictable, anguished eroticism.

I'm sure that if you've thought less about the emotions involved with sex and the definitions involved with love than I have, you would be really moved by this book. I, as such, was moved by moments of recognition, rather than shock or confrontation.

Little Birds by Anais Nin

2007-06-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of short stories. Sexuality is too complex to be addressed through only one or two characters (unless those characters are perfectly dynamic and their author is something of a genius). Also, sometimes a long-drawn out explanation of sexuality (as you might encounter in a Kundera novel) is too much. The facts often speak for themselves.

The opening story, from which the collection takes its name, is beautiful and, in a way, tragic. Many of the stories are like that. Nin's style is very erotic without entering into pornography. Even barely sketched characters are attracted to one another through personality.

This is an important book to read, but I think most books about sexuality are important to read. Anything to put a complex human face on the sexual act. She provides perversion with eroticism, and without judgment. Each story is more "show" than it is "tell" and more "tell" than it is "explain."

This is a pretty fast read and might make you reconsider the sexual value of garter belts (real ones, not those stripper ones with little hot pink bows and whatnot). The thirteen stories are each quite short, which makes this good for either commuter reading or naughty bedtime reading to your (I should hope) equally literature-inclined partner.

Every story concerns fantasy in some way or another, but the collection itself is a fantasy. Reading it is losing yourself to a reverie, one in which sexuality is properly addressed and explored, instead of condemned before it is understood or examined. If more books like this are written and read, that reverie has a better chance at becoming widely-accepted as the reality it is.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2007-06-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

To date, this is the only Salinger work I have read, although Franny and Zooey sits on the shelf, waiting.

Talking about this book entails talking about how I talked about this book when I was fifteen. Most people I've spoken to read this book when they were teenagers. For some reason, someone somewhere decided that The Catcher in the Rye was a piece of literature that should be "gotten out of your system" as early as possible. There is a cultural air of danger around this novel, but its only threat is that it requires a repeat read.

When you are fifteen, Holden Caulfield is just a little too easy to identify with. So easy, in fact, that the book doesn't feel like the masterpiece it really is. Everyone but you is a phony, everyone but you is an idiot, everyone but you is cruel, everyone but you "doesn't get it." Regular aphorisms of American youth. Sentiments that are, at this point, mundane. Catcher most likely had a hand in cultivating this mentality, but when the outsider mentality becomes the norm, how threatening can we really consider Holden?

I found the book was providing different messages when I read it last month than I did when I read it at fifteen. Yes, everyone is still a bunch of phonies, idiots, and cads. I would like to meet the well-educated person who has been able to completely eradicate this kind of sentiment from their thoughts. However, Holden's contradictory behavior sheds a more important light on these opinions.

The anti-phony is a phony. He lies, he tricks, he's dishonest. He's the hypocrite of the modern world. So what becomes intriguing about him is no longer that he's an outcast. Instead, his character is interesting because he shows us what kind of personal failures will keep up in the mentality of a teenager.

Holden suffers from a severe lack of introspection. His declarative statements about other people never result in self-examination of character or behavior. He is so focused on what is out there that he becomes severely detached from himself. He is so out of touch with his own body and mind that he misinterprets a hangover as just depression. He is quick to tell the reader what he hates and what he likes, but he never asks himself, "Why do I hate this and like that?" or "Why do I say I hate these qualities, and then express them myself?"

It is as though, like for most people, the horrible truth of the world is easier to digest than the horrible truth of oneself.

To introspect, to turn one's cynicism onto yourself, is discouraged in today's society. After all, it might lead to anxiety or depression, or something else that would require a pill. Therapy is still a dirty word to most people, and understanding your own motives is highly underrated as a means of bettering oneself, if not merely learning more about the human condition.

Holden is less of a hero and more of a warning. He is the voice of the fifteen-year-old still rambling away in the corner of your brain. We may never be able to get rid of him, and we may not want to. He has moments of insight, and his casual tone takes existential frustrations out of the hands of the philosophers and puts them in the hands of the man-on-the-street. It is important that we move past Holden, however. Not destroy him, but see him for what he is.

Everyman by Philip Roth

2007-06-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

This is only the second Roth book I have ever read, the first being The Plot Against America. There's a copy of Portnoy's Complaint on a bookshelf in my mother's house, but I never got around to reading it.

Reading about mortality is really difficult for some people, but I don't mind it. I enjoy stories about elderly people and the loss of youth. Death hasn't been the same issue for me since I had my stroke at twenty, so I think I came to this book with a slightly different attitude than most people my age would.

This book is very good, but I wasn't drooling all over it. The protagonist is well-constructed for highlighting the themes of aging. He becomes increasingly sympathetic as the novel goes on, and he gets closer and closer to death. Aging is usually thought of as bringing perspective, in terms of wisdom, but this novel doesn't let the reader forget that some perspective is very painful.

I would love to narrow down what the most insightful and moving passages are, but then I end up with a list like this: the ones to do with his father, the ones to do with his brother, the ones to do with his wives, the ones to do with his sons, the ones to do with daughter, the ones to do with his childhood, etc. That's almost the entirety of the book! What really does stand out, though, is a short friendship he develops with a member of the painting class he teaches at a resting home. Her painfully emotional descriptions of getting older are exquisite and a good foil to the protagonist's relatively stoic memories.

Overall, this book was wonderful. It described aging and death well because, in the end, it revealed the humanity of the process. According to Roth's characters, being older doesn't change the nature of existence, just its duration. You may think this is a manifest truth, but Everyman reveals the complex pain of living such an obvious reality, especially inside a society that treats its elderly like a different species.

Introduction.

2007-06-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

I am an avid reader with nowhere to put my thoughts concerning what I read. I noticed they added a "Movies" application to Facebook, so that everyone can tell everyone their thoughts on movies. This application achieves nothing new or exciting for me. It's the BOOKS I have few people to talk to about. Everyone's going to the damn movies! I love movies, too, but they are already being talked about so much that I don't want to add to the mess.

I will post about books I'm reading as I read them, which means these will not be comprehensive reviews. No spoiler warnings will be provided, although I will most likely choose to write about the books abstractly, so don't worry.

The first few posts will cover the books I have read since graduating from UC Berkeley in May, and eventually I'll catch up to what I'm currently reading.

Feel free to provide recommendations, opinions, disagreements, etc.