Quick Reviews

I don’t seem to be able to find much time to write substantive reviews of all I’ve read, but I do want to put a few words to each book for my memory’s sake. That is much of the reason I started blogging in the first place. Here are some fast and dirty thoughts about a stack recent books:

  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
I listened to the audiobook version of this and found it absolutely gripping. Listening to a book often slows down my processing and allows me to reflect on structure, and I think this was a particularly good book to do that with. There is no question from the start of the books about who did the murdering and who was murdered–but how exactly did it go down and why? These points don’t come together until about three-quarters of the way through when we have really solid portraits of all involved. I believe Capote is to be credited/blamed with our pop culture fascination with the killer’s mind. He sold it so well.

5/5, library audiobook

The Overstory by Richard Powers

I loved, loved this book. It starts with a series of short-story-like chapters, each establishing a character and his or her background. In each chapter/story there is a tree: a chestnut, mulberry, redwood, ash, beech, oak. Then Powers expands the structure. He takes the last of the characters, a college student who accidentally electrocutes herself but comes back from this near-death experience with a sense of a mission that propels her out of college, on the road where she meets another of the characters….and slowly all are knitted together in an overarching story about a group of people’s quest to save the forests. What’s remarkable about this book is not only the way Powers connects each of these characters and their stories together into a meaningful plot, but also the way he smoothly integrates research and science on trees, forests, and other species. This book could have come off as a fragmentary, cheesy eco-novel, but instead it becomes  a symphony that makes you weep for the beauty of the forests and weep for our ignorant, casual destruction of such riches for such mostly shallow purposes.

5/5, library copy

Goodbye to a River by John Graves

John Graves heard in the late 50s that plans were underfoot to put 13 dams on a single 250 mile stretch of the Brazos river in West Texas, an area of the country he had a nostalgic attachment to.  So he decided to take a meandering canoe trip down the then still-wild stretch of the river. He wrote this memoir about it. He interlaces observations about the natural world, the weather, hunting, and his traveling companion, a dog, with anecdotes about the history in this stretch of river which was once a hot spot for clashes between westward pushing pioneers and the native population, particularly the formidable Comanche. Along with these tales are stories about homesteader rivalries and character descriptions of some of the old-timers and oddballs he meets on the river. I really liked Graves’ awareness, even back in 1960, of all the natural glory that was being lost and wasted both by the dam proposals and increased human activity in general. But some of the anecdotes were more tedious than illuminating, and he used way too many ellipses, which really affected how I read the memoir. This book got a lot of attention in its day, and I believe only 3 or so of the dam projects were actually built as a result.

3/5, personal copy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I have been curious about this book for so long and honestly, I don’t know what the fuss is. Would someone please explain? It’s a book about privileged  people who don’t do very much besides drink and vacillate between delight and disapproval of each other, religion, love, and change. Could it be all the vague–or even bold–suggestions of homosexuality of many of the characters that have garnered such praises? I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t find it as brilliant as I expected either. I wonder if I’d listened to this narrated by a really great voice actor if I’d have appreciated it more. I read this one as part of my 2018 TBR Pile Challenge books.

3/5, personal copy

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I was fascinated by this multigenerational story of Korean immigrants to Japan, before, during, and after the war, who end up carving out a successful business niche in Japanese society running pachinko parlors. Before starting, I knew a bit about how poorly Koreans have been treated by the Japanese. Even after generations, most descendants of Korean-born immigrants still have to renew their papers to stay in Japan, their country of birth and cultural identification. This book gave me characters and a story to hang this general knowledge on, even if it was fiction. It was a very different take on Japan than I’d ever read. Highly recommend this if you enjoy family sagas, immigrant stories, and stories set in Japan.

5/5, personal copy

19 Books of Summer + Middlemarch Round-Up

I did pretty well on the 20 books of summer challenge — better than I expected. Before September 3 rolled around I had finished 14 books. This number includes the last three books of Middlemarch and concludes it. Huzzah! That’s a pretty good run for me, especially considering how busy my summer was.

But September has proved to be busier yet. I’ve not even finished a single book this month. But in the spirit of finishing this up and moving on, I am going to mini-review the last three books I read as part of the challenge and say a few words about Middlemarch. And be done.

  The Marquise of O— by Heinrich von Kleist

In this strange novella, published in 1808, the virtuous,  respectable, and widowed Countess of O— finds herself unaccountably pregnant with her fourth child. Certainly the Marquise is aware of how babies are made, but she cannot recall the circumstances that have brought about her condition, and it puts her honor in serious question with her family. So she places an ad in the newspaper asking for the father of her child to present himself to her. The story is a bit more complicated that I am describing, but even a close reading left me puzzled. Most analyses infer rape by a Russian Count seeking her hand in marriage, but there is a strange scene with the Marquise sitting on her father’s lap kissing him deeply that was disturbing and suspect. It’s a short and interesting read, but I guarantee you will be going back to try to figure out what you missed. Let me know if you find it. 4/5

In the middle of Middlemarch

I’m keeping up with one of my 2017 reading resolutions — that is, to read one book of  Middlemarch a month. Today I finished Book IV: Three Love Problems, which puts my bookmark right in the middle.

As I’ve been reading, I’ve thought about how I might or might not want to comment here in my blog. I think with Middlemarch, as with many famous and classic novels, the world doesn’t really need any more reviews, so this is more a scattershot of some thoughts and impressions. And they might only make sense if you’ve read Middlemarch — or even a part of it.

I find reading Middlemarch that I have to give my utmost concentration to the writing. There are sections of dialogue and storytelling when I can read along with ease, but when the narrator steps in, as she so often does, I have to really slow down and parse the train of thought. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. It tempts me to describe the narrator’s style as turgid, but I think it’s really the opposite. Eliot’s use of language is so precise and dense with meaning that it often demands my full engagement to reckon the complexity of the idea she’s putting across — and/or it exceeds my ability. But when I do get it, most of the time, the narrator’s ideas seem to express human truth in a fresh way:

Time Reading Program: All the King’s Men

Cover illustration by Jerome Martin

I am surfacing again after a long, slow, delicious reading of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. What a gem this book is! I can see why it won the Pulitzer in 1947 and why it is still well-known today — although I think it deserves to be more widely read.

Time Reading Program: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Cover art by Ed Young.

I have always thought of Thornton Wilder as a playwright rather than a novelist. But not only was Wilder a novelist, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for The Bridge of San Luis Rey — which is also on the list of the American Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the (20th) century. It’s a slim thing, not even 200 pages. But Wilder’s style and his thematic interests give it a sort of mythic grandeur.

Innocence & Authenticity

Does authenticity matter in fiction? Do we need to believe in the truth of the characters and their behaviors to stick with or appreciate a novel? I think that my answer to this question is yes, at least me for me. If I can’t believe in the character, it is like watching a poorly acted movie. The suspension of my immediate reality never occurs, and I am never sucked into the book (or movie) in a deeply satisfying way.

Time Reading Program: The Day of the Locust

Cover art by Bill Berry

The Day of the Locust is widely considered one of Nathanael West’s best novels and a classic, along with his other great novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. When you’ve only published four novels and two are lauded, those are excellent statistics.

The Day of the Locust is a rather bleak satire of Hollywood in the 1930s. The main character, Tod, is an artist who comes to LA for inspiration for his next painting. He meets a series of oddball characters, many of whom are more interesting, to my mind, than he is. Many of the characters have come to California from other parts of the country, and we are repeatedly told that they have “come to California to die.”

How true is A True Novel?

I have never read Wuthering Heights. But after finishing A True Novel by Minae Mizumura and reading that it was a retelling of WH, I took a short cut and watched the Masterpiece Theater version of the classic to get an idea of how the two compared, at least plot-wise. A True Novel is a retelling of WH, albeit set in Japan and with a Japanese sensibility. However, the entire retelling is also framed within a uniquely Japanese literary genre of the I-novel and “plays” with the historical interest Japanese writers have had in distinguishing between a “true novel” or an “I-novel.”

The Good Earth

Has the Little Library movement taken over your neighborhood? I always thought this was a terrific idea, but now there are so many of these boxes on each block in my neighborhood that I feel adding one more of my own would be overkill. Still, when I take walks, I peek in each one to see what interesting books might be waiting (never mind that I have a TBR pile from hell at home), and sometimes find something too intriguing to pass by. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was one of those.

The Big Sky

“Serena  Claudill heard a step outside and the squeak of the cabin door and knew that John was coming in.  She kept poking at the fireplace, in which a hen was browning. “ – The Big Sky, A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

Why have I not read this book before? The Big Sky could be considered, in my humble opinion, a contender for the status of the Great American Novel. I am surprised it is not more widely read or referenced. Where Lonesome Dove is described by many as the ultimate novel of the wild American West, McMurtry definitely owes a debt to Guthrie who perhaps launched the genre with this much grittier, atmospheric, and perhaps literary song to the lost wild places and people of this country. The Big Sky is set decades earlier than LD, in the 1830s when the northwest part of the US was the territory of the Crow, Blackfeet, and Sioux.  The only white men in those parts were a few mountain men and trappers.