Book Reviews, June-December 2017

(This post is a continuation of my yearly book list. The first half of the year's books were covered previously.)

My reading predictably slowed down as life sped up this year, which has literally been a year of fire and flood. I will think of 2017 as a challenge until it is safely in the rear view mirror, and then I will hopefully think of it no more. 

In the margins, on the commutes, in the 5 minutes before I fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning, I managed to cram a couple more books in this latter half of the year. 32 books total for the year, though I have read fairly large sections of about 7 more. I hope to put those to rest fairly early in the new year and start clearing some backlog from my stack of books. It's become large enough to exert a non-negligible gravity and has shown signs of developing rudimentary ecological systems, so I really should get on that...


The Best We Could Do - Thi Bui
I don't often include graphic novels in this list, but this was a really moving work on the quintessential American experience of immigration and building a new sense of place. The story of a Vietnamese immigrant family struggling to bridge history and culture was especially meaningful in a year so marred by xenophobia and an ugly darkness rising in this country. I don't think I place it in the same league as Maus or Persepolis, partly because I don't think the art was as integral to the storytelling (it would have been equally compelling as a novel), but definitely worth reading. 

World's Fair - E.L. Doctorow
I had previously enjoyed City of God and Welcome to Hard Times so I thought I'd read a few more of Doctorow's books this year. World's Fair recreates the sense of place of the Depression-era Bronx, through the eyes of a young boy. Some of the text is masterful, some plodding. It doesn't have much that differentiates it from similar NYC in the Depression works, and never really gels a sense of place and time and atmosphere like Chabon's Kavalier and Clay. I read one (mostly positive) review that said the author seemed to be having trouble differentiating between the voices of memoir and novel, which felt accurate. 

Loon Lake - E.L. Doctorow
As compared to Fair, Loon Lake was a bit more memorable. Another Depression-era tale, the story of a boy drifter, young girl, and somewhat two-dimensional millionaire industrialist at an isolated cabin in the Adirondacks. Even though this was described as "an experimental novel" in style, I thought the story felt very traditional, with hints of Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, etc. The archetypes here feel well trodden, even though Doctorow's writing occasionally elevates the reading. The novel does present a very strong sense of place, even for a story that feels like a bit of a retread. While I enjoyed the story, sometimes it felt like it was in spite of Doctorow just trying to hard to shove a very traditional story into a somewhat pretentious set of forms. City of God took up some of the same "experiemental" banners, but with a story more suited to it, and a deftness greater than Lake.

Birds of Jamaica - Ann Haynes-Sutton
While this was mostly a field guide, bought in preparation for a anniversary trip to Jamaica, it was written from a much more intimate scale and thoughtful approach than many of the larger field guides for bigger areas. 


Billy Bathgate - E.L. Doctorow
I think part of my hit and miss experience with Doctorow thus far has been due to reading more of his minor works than his celebrated hits. Bathgate  is a more widely read Doctorow novel, and it's fairly easy to see why. The ground covered in this gangster novel is not entirely new, but Doctorow handles it deftly. The story revolves around the young eponymous narrator who through somewhat hackneyed pluck secures himself a place in Dutch Schultz's retinue during the gangster heyday of the 30s. The story swirls through typical gangster elements...rivalries, molls, assasinations, etc. but Doctorow manages to blow up some of the typical elements, and his characters feel well formed. The dialogue between Billy and Schultz's consiglieri Berman forms the beating core of the book. 

An American War - Omar El Akkad
I (and apparently so many others) love post-apocalyptic tales. Whether it's zombies or plague or undefined global collapse, it seems like there's some visceral thrill to pondering "what if it all just fell away and we started over?". Especially in 2017, I think we can all empathize with the underlying infatuation with contemplating a restart...a global do-over. This appeal has been tempered for me in recent years by the flood of (mostly YA) post-apocalyptic fiction, much of it derivative refuse. Even lauded, "literary" works like Whitehead's Zone One haven't done much for me (Mandel's Station 11, notwithstanding). An American War was the standout I'd been looking for. While it is not the most literary offering (it's not in the same league as McCarthy's The Road), it is exponentially better quality prose than most of this genre. The book recasts contemporary ideas of identity, radicalization, sides-versus-principles, and the divide between the personal and national experience in the form of a second civil war brought on in no small part by resource scarcity and climate change. The "protagonist" (the novel declines to lionize anyone, even while it humanizes its sometimes monstrous characters) is southern, already challenging our traditional god/bad dichotomy, and the novel follows the course of national upheaval and eventual terrorist cataclysm at a very personal, sometimes claustrophobic level. It avoids easy categories, and forces you to deal with its characters as individuals, to experience paths toward radicalization and collaboration an a fundamentally organic way.  

High Mountains of Portugal - Yann Martel
My expectations for this book were really off base, so it's hard to come back around to an objective look at it. The novel is a series of interrelated stories of widowers set in Portugal. I had expected a somewhat whimsical, magical-realism type novel similar to Life of Pi. Even a third into the book, that's mostly what was going on, like the novelization of a Wes Anderson film, with a backwards walking narrator driving an automobile through superstitious peasant towns on a nigh-quixotic quest. Imagine Wes Anderson directing 100 Years of Solitude, and you're about where this ended up. Then it got really dark. Then it got really weird. In the end it was a satisfying, if less accessible, work than Pi, that meditates on our reactions to loss (in a way that, if you'll permit me me to pretentiously reference another author yet again, reminded me a lot of Murakami) The eventual reveals and connections are subtle and vast, and the writing (even at its most Martel-ish) is enjoyable.   

Mr. Splitfoot - Samantha Hunt
Splitfoot is an interwoven tale across two generations that is hard to begin to describe. It follows two women on simultaneous (from the prose standpoint) and divergent (from chornological standpoint) journeys to a similar location. In one an orphan and faux spiritualist....no, wait...in the other a mute and her pregnant niece go to....wow...It's hard to really say anything about the book without being a spoiler. The book's revelations match pace with the women on their separate journies, and the connections start to reveal toward the end, when you suddenly see both stories in a completely different light. I heard it described as a "fever dream" and that's pretty apt. 

Bones of Paradise - Jonis Agee
There are times when you doubt an author based on a previous work, and then you give them one more chance and you really fall in love with a book. This is not one of those occasions. Bones of Paradise was a clunky, new-western novel about a ranching family embroiled in a murder mystery that stirs up generational...oh my God, I can't even bring myself to finish typing that it was so formulaic. . Nominally literature, the writing was about on par with a Zane Gray/Louis L'amour western-of-the-week (and that's not an insult to those authors, just reflecting that this felt like one of those more than a denser work). However, while Grey/L'amour at least give you a straight-ahead satisfying cowboy story. The sad thing is that the book had the trappings of a good story. In the hands of Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy this thing would have been dynamite. I read The Weight of Dreams several years ago and pretty much felt the same way, so I probably won't be reading anymore Agee. There were a few notable characters that really felt flushed out, but the way Agee clumsily knocked them about in 2 dimensional settings was cringe-worthy. 

21- Patrick O'Brian
I loved the 20 completed Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian (sailing ships in the Napoleonic War - the movie Master and Commander was based on his novels). Unfortunately he died before completing his 21st. In the time honored tradition of making a buck on the deceased, they cobbled together some notes and the first chapter or two of an unedited work and called it 21 - the unfinished something or other who cares because it shoul dnot have been. That's probably not very charitable of me, the fan outcry for more of his work is pretty strong, and even knowing it was a snippet probably left alone, I still read it. But there's really nothing of value here. Better to turn the last page of Blue at the Mizzen, and let Jack Aubrey sail off under a fine press of canvas to an unknowable, but assumedly grand, destiny.  

The Ancient Minstrel - Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison's novels (and mostly novellas) are a mix of austere, epic writing like Legends of the Fall and The River Swimmer and more crass (but well written) banality of the Upper Peninsula like the retired detective stories of The Great Leader. The Ancient Minstrel was a mix of the two, with a beautiful story of a lone woman carving a life for herself sandwiched between a weirdly rambling fictitious biography of a writer and a really uncomfortable (though satisfyingly ended) continuation of a character from some of his previous Upper Peninsula novels. Even though this collection is somewhat lacking in general, and especially in terms of connection as a single work, his writing is still entertaining and poetic.  If you hadn't read Harrison before I would not start here. 

Brown Dog - Jim Harrison
Brown Dog was a much more satisfying collection of stories about a single character. Set in the UP like many of his stories, it follows a period in the life of a semi-educated man of mixed white and Native American ancestry. The weighty sense of place and unique UP culture meshes well with the portrayal of poverty and characters of the stories. The iterative set of tales feels almost like a ring cycle of stories, different seasons in the man's life and relationships. It delves into Harrison's usual fascination with the base human instincts and ultimately comic fallibility, but in a less over the top way than Great Leader. The story takes Brown Dog through subsistence level but carefree existence to greater connections and responsibilities. As usual, Harrison doesn't pull punches in laying humanity bare to its uglier, sillier aspects, but using Brown Dog as a lens his focus is less on his character's shortcomings, but on commenting on the discrepancy between how we view those, and how he views ours, in terms of society as a whole. The audiobook to this was exceptionally well read. 

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
I was happy to end the year on this novel of the converging lives of a young, blind French girl and a young German soldier in World War II. While that premise may sound like it's been done to death, the intricacy and detail of their stories makes for captivating writing. A blind girl grows up in the confines of the museum for which her father works, in the midst of a mutli-layered images of puzzles and lockworks, while a German orphan obsessed with mathematics is channeled into the German state and war machine. Eventually their stories converge, compress, and explode outward. The layers and precision of writing here were happy surprises for me; I had only picked up the book because it was available at the library and vaguely remembered it winning some award (Pulitzer, among others). I'm glad I did, and will now have to explore some of Doerr's other works.