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trinityofone61. Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry — In which Stephen Fry gives a frank and funny recounting of the first twenty years of his life. Dude’s got balls, man: I could never be this honest about myself or my life. And I’m saying that as someone who has not emerged semi-intact from the truly insane-sounding English public school system. It really is an entirely different world, and Fry makes for a straightforward, yet sensitive, guide. Everything he says about not fitting in just makes me ache, especially his discussion about his inability to sing—and if this were fiction instead of biography, wouldn’t music make the most perfect metaphor? Real life is sometimes so generous with its symbolism.
Fry takes full advantage of this fact when appropriate, and he’s a very good storyteller, wonderfully tangential and honest and reflective. A book like this could be considered navel-gazing, and in a very real way it is the story of the author trying to figure himself out, but the narrative voice is so open, the reader can’t help but want to join in the analysis. If you’ve ever thought, even in passing, that you’d enjoy having a nice meal and then getting quite drunk with someone like Stephen Fry, then you’ll enjoy this very much, I should think.
62. Larque on the Wing, Nancy Springer — In some ways, this book spoke to me more personally and profoundly than any I've read in a long time. It's the story of Larque, a mother and wife in her 40s who's having an unusual midlife crisis—one that involves the manifestation of a version of herself at age 10 and the transformation of her current self into a man. The book won a Tiptree Award, and even without knowing what it was up against that year, I'm 100% positive it deserved it—the book is practically overflowing with excellent insights into sex and gender. There are parts of this book that had me dogearing pages and wanting to add exclamation marks to the margins—an almost unheard of reaction in me. One paragraph in particular:
And if Shadow was gay—then he was like her. Dimly, with her burning heart more than her mind, she began to understand why she had always liked gay men. They suffered, were persecuted, they were outsiders in a world where studbuck male heteros held all the power, they did not count, they were Other—the way women were.
I mean—yes. Yes. That's it exactly, isn't it? That's the essence of so much of my life and who I am, right there, and it's shocking and amazing to see it in print. That alone makes this a very valuable and important book for me.
However, it works better for me as a philosophical or ideological text than it does as a novel. To begin with, it's magical realism, and I always have—much to my eternal disappointment—a bit of trouble with magical realism. When strange shit is happening, I want characters to react to it like it's strange shit—but magical realism characters are always so damn accepting! There were also some things about the prose, the course of the plot, and the characterization that didn't quite gel for me—I think I relate to Springer's ideas much more strongly than I do to her writing.
Still, I am DELIGHTED to have read this. It's not a book whose story sang to me—not a Neverwhere or a Great Gatsby or a Golden Compass or any number of others, both classic and "crass"; however, for those moments where it was like a mirror held up to life, my life...I can't quite get over that, or even fully believe that such a book actually exists. You should read it too, just so I know I wasn't imagining things.
63. The Rules of Modern Policing: 1973 Edition, Guy Adams — A little treat for myself, ordered from England. And totally worth the six quid I spent. Taking the form of a policing manual written by the Gene Genie himself (with notes and doodles by DC Skelton), this is one of the best tie-in type books I've ever encountered. The real author (some guy named Guy) has got Gene's voice down pretty well—it's very surface Gene, but if he really were writing a book like this (perish the thought), it would be. And it's legitimately very funny—I'll admit, I LOL'd. (There are also a bunch of photos of Philip Glenister being a hotass—I AM PRO!) If you're a fan of the show (Life on Mars, for those of you who weren't paying attention/can't read my mind), you'll almost certainly like this.
And if you're not a fan...well, why AREN'T you? *wants everyone to share her latest obsession, dammit*
64. Ultimate Marvel Team-Up (Vol. 1), Brian Michael Bendis — I'm pretty sure I actually read the issues collected herein before, back when I had a disposable income and bought comics books (a.k.a. high school). Spider-Man encounters the Hulk, Iron Man, and what appears to be teenage mutant (ninja?) Wolverine. The Wolverine issue is the best, if only for the gag at the end. In general, though: it's fluff, silly good-natured fluff, but sadly not terribly interesting fluff. I feel like I've seen it all before. Which, okay, may be because I HAVE, but still. Perhaps I am less easily entertained than when I was 17? This makes me sad.
65. The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, The Editors of McSweeney’s — Sort of gently amusing, as opposed to the laugh-out-loud funny I'd been hoping for. A lot of the pieces were rather of one-note, and thus seemed to go on too long. One would probably be better off just poking around on the site for a while rather than dishing out $13 for this. (And what a sad commentary on the internet vs. books this review has become! Alas.)
66. The Rotters’ Club, Jonathan Coe — Really fabulous novel about growing up in Birmingham, England, in the ’70s. Coe tackles all the usual adolescent woes, but also politics and history and music and culture and… If this were a fantasy novel, I’d call it amazing world-building. Instead, Coe makes the real world—one I’ve never experienced, true, but a world that did exist—come alive so vividly.
I acquired this book last year, I believe on the recommendation of one of Nick Hornby’s Believer columns, and it sat on my shelf until I remembered it was set in England in the ’70s, hello Life on Mars connection. And it does capture sense of place much as that show does: color and texture and the taste of the food and the clothes people wore and the music—lots and lots about the music… And of course, this is all the more impressive as Coe does all of this without the aid of sets and costumes and actors. This is some amazingly lively prose, here. He switches POV a lot, which was at first confusing, as there are a lot of characters and it’s initially tough to keep track of who is related to whom, and who is crushing on whom, and who is a total scumbag. But once you get a little farther in, it’s incredibly easy to get gloriously lost amongst the excerpts from the school newspaper and the letters and diary entries—there’s even a bit of a Molly Bloom’s soliloquy pastiche at the end, and it all, amazingly, works. The ending’s a bit abrupt—a surprise set-up for a sequel—but it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that felt so alive, so full of real people, and real human tragedy and humor and life. What a wonderful surprise.
67. Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock — In which time travel and Jesus are combined in a somewhat interesting way—yes, the one you’re thinking; or at least, the one my mind leapt to, without actually being told. Anyway, it’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure the story used to convey the idea is the best it could have possibly been. I sympathize with this problem, as it’s one I have all the time with my own writing. *coughHuman Vacillationcough* However, I feel less than sympathetic toward Karl, this novel’s protagonist, who’s a whiny little bitch; and toward Moorcock, for the way he writes women. Combining Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene into one woman is sort of an interesting idea, but once again, the execution just leaves us with a character who’s a nasty ho. And then there’s Karl’s girlfriend, who ditches him in favor of another woman…who could blame her, honestly? Man, this book leaves you with a dim outlook on humanity. Which I guess could be the point, in a watch-me-drip-with-irony sort of way. But I think it makes for a rather shallow, sallow reading experience.
68. The Deportees, Roddy Doyle — Really interesting collection of stories about race and racism in Dublin. These were originally published serially, with each of the stories broken down into 800-word segments, and Doyle admits in the introduction that he didn’t really plan ahead, so a couple of them sort of meander and change direction in ways that can be slightly disconcerting. (This is most apparent in the collection’s first story, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner”; I think Doyle was still getting used to the format.) Most of them are really excellent, though, and MY GOD did they make me miss Ireland. Possibly Doyle’s number one strength is his ability to capture the rhythm and character of speech; reading his dialogue really does make you feel like you’re listening in on a conversation on an O’Connell Street corner. *sniff* And how much do you wanna bet Siria’s laughing and rolling her eyes at me now? ;-)
Anyway, I’d definitely recommend this, although I’d also recommend that you read The Commitments—and maybe the whole Barrytown Trilogy—first, as one of the stories here is a quasi-sequel to that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off crying over Aer Lingus ticket prices.
69. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff — Willie Upton returns in disgrace to her hometown of Templeton, New York (a very thinly disguised Cooperstown) and starts trying to unravel a family mystery that, seeing as Willie is a descendant of Marmaduke Temple, the founder of the town, is intimately intertwined with the history of the entire community.
I really thought I was going to like this book. History and mystery and research! Weird, magical realism touches like the discovery of a monster in the lake! Multiple points of view, including samples of “historical documents”! And yet—I never believed in it: not the community, and not the characters. We’re told Willie is brilliant, and yet she not only goes about her investigation in a frustratingly slow way, she fails at basic math. (Not to mention becomes convinced she’s pregnant and yet NEVER GOES TO A DOCTOR OR TAKES A PREGNANCY TEST.) There are a slew of other ridiculous details the reader is expected to swallow, too: I mean, I will accept a prehistoric sea monster living in upstate New York (Champ is TOTALLY REAL, yo), but I simply cannot believe in a character named Ezekiel Felcher. Yes, FELCHER.
There’s also just something about the narrative that simply…lacks energy. Unlike the similarly-constructed Rotters’ Club, which practically cracks and sparks off its pages, The Monsters of Templeton just sort of lies there. I felt no zip, no kineticism—no joy. Groff says in the forward that she’s in a sense writing a love letter to her town, but I never really felt that love. I can all-too-easily get caught up in small-town nostalgia—I grew up in one, and the right combination of words or sounds or smells can instantly make me forget all the bad things and remember instead some Ray Bradbury-esque version of the village green, the waterfall over the river, the old mill buildings, the big white church spire. But none of that was here. I got no sense of the layout or the character of the town at all.
Instead, I got Ezekiel Felcher. Yes, FELCHER. Excuse me while I fail to get over that.
70. The Big Time, Fritz Leiber — A bunch of wooden, unconvincing characters—refugees, in a sense, from the Time War—are stuck in the Place together, a safe space outside of time that’s used for soldiers’ R&R. Except the Place has been sabotaged, and there’s a bomb and possibly a traitor in their midst and blah blah blah…man, this was boring. The characters, as I said, had all the texture and depth of my cardboard Spike stand-up, the plot was rather half-assed, and the whole thing just felt very juvenile, like the sort of story I used to encounter in my college creative writing workshop. And this won a Hugo? Sigh. Well, at least it was short.
Total Reviews: 70/71
YES! I did it! We may now resume regular weekly booklog service. Or I hope so, anyway.
Fry takes full advantage of this fact when appropriate, and he’s a very good storyteller, wonderfully tangential and honest and reflective. A book like this could be considered navel-gazing, and in a very real way it is the story of the author trying to figure himself out, but the narrative voice is so open, the reader can’t help but want to join in the analysis. If you’ve ever thought, even in passing, that you’d enjoy having a nice meal and then getting quite drunk with someone like Stephen Fry, then you’ll enjoy this very much, I should think.
62. Larque on the Wing, Nancy Springer — In some ways, this book spoke to me more personally and profoundly than any I've read in a long time. It's the story of Larque, a mother and wife in her 40s who's having an unusual midlife crisis—one that involves the manifestation of a version of herself at age 10 and the transformation of her current self into a man. The book won a Tiptree Award, and even without knowing what it was up against that year, I'm 100% positive it deserved it—the book is practically overflowing with excellent insights into sex and gender. There are parts of this book that had me dogearing pages and wanting to add exclamation marks to the margins—an almost unheard of reaction in me. One paragraph in particular:
And if Shadow was gay—then he was like her. Dimly, with her burning heart more than her mind, she began to understand why she had always liked gay men. They suffered, were persecuted, they were outsiders in a world where studbuck male heteros held all the power, they did not count, they were Other—the way women were.
I mean—yes. Yes. That's it exactly, isn't it? That's the essence of so much of my life and who I am, right there, and it's shocking and amazing to see it in print. That alone makes this a very valuable and important book for me.
However, it works better for me as a philosophical or ideological text than it does as a novel. To begin with, it's magical realism, and I always have—much to my eternal disappointment—a bit of trouble with magical realism. When strange shit is happening, I want characters to react to it like it's strange shit—but magical realism characters are always so damn accepting! There were also some things about the prose, the course of the plot, and the characterization that didn't quite gel for me—I think I relate to Springer's ideas much more strongly than I do to her writing.
Still, I am DELIGHTED to have read this. It's not a book whose story sang to me—not a Neverwhere or a Great Gatsby or a Golden Compass or any number of others, both classic and "crass"; however, for those moments where it was like a mirror held up to life, my life...I can't quite get over that, or even fully believe that such a book actually exists. You should read it too, just so I know I wasn't imagining things.
63. The Rules of Modern Policing: 1973 Edition, Guy Adams — A little treat for myself, ordered from England. And totally worth the six quid I spent. Taking the form of a policing manual written by the Gene Genie himself (with notes and doodles by DC Skelton), this is one of the best tie-in type books I've ever encountered. The real author (some guy named Guy) has got Gene's voice down pretty well—it's very surface Gene, but if he really were writing a book like this (perish the thought), it would be. And it's legitimately very funny—I'll admit, I LOL'd. (There are also a bunch of photos of Philip Glenister being a hotass—I AM PRO!) If you're a fan of the show (Life on Mars, for those of you who weren't paying attention/can't read my mind), you'll almost certainly like this.
And if you're not a fan...well, why AREN'T you? *wants everyone to share her latest obsession, dammit*
64. Ultimate Marvel Team-Up (Vol. 1), Brian Michael Bendis — I'm pretty sure I actually read the issues collected herein before, back when I had a disposable income and bought comics books (a.k.a. high school). Spider-Man encounters the Hulk, Iron Man, and what appears to be teenage mutant (ninja?) Wolverine. The Wolverine issue is the best, if only for the gag at the end. In general, though: it's fluff, silly good-natured fluff, but sadly not terribly interesting fluff. I feel like I've seen it all before. Which, okay, may be because I HAVE, but still. Perhaps I am less easily entertained than when I was 17? This makes me sad.
65. The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, The Editors of McSweeney’s — Sort of gently amusing, as opposed to the laugh-out-loud funny I'd been hoping for. A lot of the pieces were rather of one-note, and thus seemed to go on too long. One would probably be better off just poking around on the site for a while rather than dishing out $13 for this. (And what a sad commentary on the internet vs. books this review has become! Alas.)
66. The Rotters’ Club, Jonathan Coe — Really fabulous novel about growing up in Birmingham, England, in the ’70s. Coe tackles all the usual adolescent woes, but also politics and history and music and culture and… If this were a fantasy novel, I’d call it amazing world-building. Instead, Coe makes the real world—one I’ve never experienced, true, but a world that did exist—come alive so vividly.
I acquired this book last year, I believe on the recommendation of one of Nick Hornby’s Believer columns, and it sat on my shelf until I remembered it was set in England in the ’70s, hello Life on Mars connection. And it does capture sense of place much as that show does: color and texture and the taste of the food and the clothes people wore and the music—lots and lots about the music… And of course, this is all the more impressive as Coe does all of this without the aid of sets and costumes and actors. This is some amazingly lively prose, here. He switches POV a lot, which was at first confusing, as there are a lot of characters and it’s initially tough to keep track of who is related to whom, and who is crushing on whom, and who is a total scumbag. But once you get a little farther in, it’s incredibly easy to get gloriously lost amongst the excerpts from the school newspaper and the letters and diary entries—there’s even a bit of a Molly Bloom’s soliloquy pastiche at the end, and it all, amazingly, works. The ending’s a bit abrupt—a surprise set-up for a sequel—but it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that felt so alive, so full of real people, and real human tragedy and humor and life. What a wonderful surprise.
67. Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock — In which time travel and Jesus are combined in a somewhat interesting way—yes, the one you’re thinking; or at least, the one my mind leapt to, without actually being told. Anyway, it’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure the story used to convey the idea is the best it could have possibly been. I sympathize with this problem, as it’s one I have all the time with my own writing. *coughHuman Vacillationcough* However, I feel less than sympathetic toward Karl, this novel’s protagonist, who’s a whiny little bitch; and toward Moorcock, for the way he writes women. Combining Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene into one woman is sort of an interesting idea, but once again, the execution just leaves us with a character who’s a nasty ho. And then there’s Karl’s girlfriend, who ditches him in favor of another woman…who could blame her, honestly? Man, this book leaves you with a dim outlook on humanity. Which I guess could be the point, in a watch-me-drip-with-irony sort of way. But I think it makes for a rather shallow, sallow reading experience.
68. The Deportees, Roddy Doyle — Really interesting collection of stories about race and racism in Dublin. These were originally published serially, with each of the stories broken down into 800-word segments, and Doyle admits in the introduction that he didn’t really plan ahead, so a couple of them sort of meander and change direction in ways that can be slightly disconcerting. (This is most apparent in the collection’s first story, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner”; I think Doyle was still getting used to the format.) Most of them are really excellent, though, and MY GOD did they make me miss Ireland. Possibly Doyle’s number one strength is his ability to capture the rhythm and character of speech; reading his dialogue really does make you feel like you’re listening in on a conversation on an O’Connell Street corner. *sniff* And how much do you wanna bet Siria’s laughing and rolling her eyes at me now? ;-)
Anyway, I’d definitely recommend this, although I’d also recommend that you read The Commitments—and maybe the whole Barrytown Trilogy—first, as one of the stories here is a quasi-sequel to that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off crying over Aer Lingus ticket prices.
69. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff — Willie Upton returns in disgrace to her hometown of Templeton, New York (a very thinly disguised Cooperstown) and starts trying to unravel a family mystery that, seeing as Willie is a descendant of Marmaduke Temple, the founder of the town, is intimately intertwined with the history of the entire community.
I really thought I was going to like this book. History and mystery and research! Weird, magical realism touches like the discovery of a monster in the lake! Multiple points of view, including samples of “historical documents”! And yet—I never believed in it: not the community, and not the characters. We’re told Willie is brilliant, and yet she not only goes about her investigation in a frustratingly slow way, she fails at basic math. (Not to mention becomes convinced she’s pregnant and yet NEVER GOES TO A DOCTOR OR TAKES A PREGNANCY TEST.) There are a slew of other ridiculous details the reader is expected to swallow, too: I mean, I will accept a prehistoric sea monster living in upstate New York (Champ is TOTALLY REAL, yo), but I simply cannot believe in a character named Ezekiel Felcher. Yes, FELCHER.
There’s also just something about the narrative that simply…lacks energy. Unlike the similarly-constructed Rotters’ Club, which practically cracks and sparks off its pages, The Monsters of Templeton just sort of lies there. I felt no zip, no kineticism—no joy. Groff says in the forward that she’s in a sense writing a love letter to her town, but I never really felt that love. I can all-too-easily get caught up in small-town nostalgia—I grew up in one, and the right combination of words or sounds or smells can instantly make me forget all the bad things and remember instead some Ray Bradbury-esque version of the village green, the waterfall over the river, the old mill buildings, the big white church spire. But none of that was here. I got no sense of the layout or the character of the town at all.
Instead, I got Ezekiel Felcher. Yes, FELCHER. Excuse me while I fail to get over that.
70. The Big Time, Fritz Leiber — A bunch of wooden, unconvincing characters—refugees, in a sense, from the Time War—are stuck in the Place together, a safe space outside of time that’s used for soldiers’ R&R. Except the Place has been sabotaged, and there’s a bomb and possibly a traitor in their midst and blah blah blah…man, this was boring. The characters, as I said, had all the texture and depth of my cardboard Spike stand-up, the plot was rather half-assed, and the whole thing just felt very juvenile, like the sort of story I used to encounter in my college creative writing workshop. And this won a Hugo? Sigh. Well, at least it was short.
Total Reviews: 70/71
YES! I did it! We may now resume regular weekly booklog service. Or I hope so, anyway.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 08:59 pm (UTC)One weird thing I didn't mention: the book includes a picture of Gene/Philip, like, GENUINELY SMILING. Open-mouthed. Friendly. A real smile, not a smirk. I don't think I've ever seen the like. It kind of freaked me out a bit!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 09:34 pm (UTC)I clearly need to read Larque, like, now.
Oh and I meant to say to your last book post: YES EXACTLY on the Hornby thing. I love him and I love his Polysyllabic Spree columns, but... Dickens. Just never really got it. And somehow Hornby manages to make me feel sad about that.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 10:16 pm (UTC)Dickens...I mean, he's DICKENS. He's supposed to be the unpretentious, humanist, humorous one...so why don't I like him? I keep trying; I just got a copy of The Haunted House, which is basically just Dickens and his buddies screwing around and creating wacky Victorian shenanigans. So I'll see how that goes.
Sigh. You have given me GUILT, Hornby! *shakes fist*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 09:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 10:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-02 11:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-02 04:35 pm (UTC)Either way, don't come crying to me when you end up eating a whole loaf of white bread. Being an old fogey, I no longer care about the problems of you young whippersnappers.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-02 05:09 pm (UTC)... and that's how I know I'm old.