Manhattan, black and white

For all its color and suffusion of densely packed life, for some reason I'll always love Manhattan in black and white. All lights and angles and layered complexity. I never get tired of wandering around the city with a camera. I think I could do so for a long time before I really scratched its surface. I got a chance to get out and about during a recent conference, and here are a few pieces of a night or two of wandering (and a couple of daytime sojourns too).

Evening Crowds, Chelsea

Icons

Empire State of Mind

Shake Shack!

Spires

City of Lights

Steam and Sky

Scaffolding

Pedestrian

In Between

For the Earnest and Young, Times Square

Light and Fog

Doors 

Converging Lines

Vines and Brick

Book Reviews, January to June 2019

I tore through a lot of books these last six months (26), on my way to what will surely be my perennial failure at a lofty "book a week" goal. In my defense, I did pretty well at the "keep my kids from destroying each other/the world" goal, so we take our victories as they come. If you only give one of the book from this list a shot, it should be Sing, Unburied, Sing; Exit West; or The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. However, if you're up for some writing that pushes comfort levels and nuance over ideological purity a bit, The Good Lord Bird was a pleasant surprise.

Julie of the Wolves – Jean Craighead George
This was one of the foundation books of my childhood. George's beloved YA book (before YA was a thing) about a solitary Inuit girl caught between traditional and modern worlds is expansive and literary, with a not-subtle focus on the agency and emotions of a self-sufficient young woman. I read this with my older daughter (admittedly, I did leave out the attempted rape scene at the start, and translated the archaic "Eskimo" into "Inuit" on the fly) who I hope loved it. I never know what to do about reading more challenging books with her...I don't want to take away her own discovery by reading them too early, but I also want a bulwark against the mindless learning to read series lining our shelves as well.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy
Roy's The God of Small Things had been one of those books that sat on my shelf for the better part of a decade before I got to it. I'm glad I did, and I'm glad I followed up with Ministry. The interwoven tales of outcasts and nontraditional characters has Roy's trademark dense imagery and subtly complex dialogue against a vibrant and violent background of India's cultural and political clashes. It's a big story writ in small details, that allows itself the nuances of human existence...humor, tragedy, self-deception, hope, all jangled together.

Bossypants - Tina Fey
This was a "I don't have any audiobooks queued up, let's see what's available last minute at the library" selection for a long road. Almost the identical set of circumstances that led me to read Amy Pohler's Yes Please. And with similar results. Both are intermittently funny sort-of-memoirs, but neither as funny as the women who wrote them have capacity for. It was ultimately forgettable and disjointed.

Sweet Land Stories - E.L. Doctorow
I've been trying to read more Doctorow, having really liked Book of Daniel and some other works. Sweet is a collection of short stories that really didn't land for me. There wasn't a really coherent theme, and the stories themselves, while I remember them being mildly enjoyable, don't stand out at all. I had a vaguely positive reaction to it at the time.

Darwin's Ghosts - Rebecca Stott
It's always been incredible to me how opponents of the scientific theory of Evolution focus with such intensity and antipathy on Darwin. Admittedly, Origins was a watershed moment in our understanding of the natural world, but evolution and natural selection as concepts did not start (and absolutely didn't end) with Darwin. The "Were you there? Derp derp derp" crowd somehow thinks poking holes in Darwin's understanding somehow invalidates everything that comes after (let alone Darwin's work itself). Stott's book does a fantastic job of dispelling the lone-evolutionary-gunman conception by delving into Darwin's precursors and the context in which ideas about the natural world evolved. She uses Darwin's own list of references as a starting point, but also considers who didn't make his cut, and why. It's a fascinating look at not only how ideas about natural systems and our place in them have changed, but how that specific topic relates to our evolving systems of knowledge, and the controls we attempt to place on them.

Exit West - Moshin Hamid
Hamid's novel of refugees is a powerful vision without an on the nose polemic. With a foot in the current era, and another in the magical realism of unexplained portals as the vehicles for refugee escape, Hamid builds poignant literary constructs around the real world drama playing out concurrently. The novel follows a young couple escaping a repressive regime. With the time-compression of the refugee journey into the symbolic portals, Hamid allows for the exploration of the human experience that prompts their flight, as well as the alien experience of starting over in a new landscape, and the constant uncertainty that surrounds it all. The NYT book review made a great comparison to the bending of the physics of transit overlying an examination of the bending of moral physics that's so evident in the current debates but also has a timeless quality. Exit lives up to the well-deserved hype. 

The English Major - Jim Harrison 
I have a love-hate relationship with Harrison, or, I guess, a love-sometimes-creeped-out-by relationship. He's one of my favorite contemporary American writers, with classics like Legends of the Fall and others demonstrating a sweepingly epic and austere style, and Brown Dog, a genius for capturing the characters and character of a place in dense, messy human form. However, once in a while (his Detective Sunderson novels mostly) his characters devolve so far into human failings that the uncomfort level outweighs the literary mastery. English Major is a nice balance between the two, a road trip by a divorcee full of messy nuance, that plays out against a general commentary on the nature of the landscape. It's elevated enough to be enjoyable enough, but still full of Harrison's trademark fallible characters and squishy, real, humanness.

Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
Wise Man's Fear is the sequel to The Name of the Wind an ambitious effort in world-and-character-building by Rothfuss focused on a rouge-ish young protagonist making his way through a magical training academy on his way to revenge for his family's deaths at the hands of otherworldly denizens. Yeah...so it's hard to do sword-and-sorcery type stuff without tripping over a dozen tropes before the end of the first chapter (the resemblance between this and other works like Piers Anthony's -inferior- Apprentice Adept series is noted), but Rothfuss has a deftness and ingenuity that makes his world work. If for no other reason I like this archetypal rags-to-prominence story because it allows it's protagonist to fail, and not in an epic self-sacrificing way, but in the little small human failures of pride, ambition, uncertainty, etc. I look forward to seeing the conclusion of Qvothe's story if Rothfuss ever gets his butt in gear with the third novel.

Get in Trouble - Kelly Link
Link is another new author for me and I picked up Get in Trouble mostly because of the sheer weight of review and accolades (including generous praise from longtime favorites Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman). The hype was right on target here, as this collection of short stories is weird, funny, and engaging. Chabon's robust characters and Gaiman's beautiful weirdness are exactly the combination of styles I would ascribe to the book, so it's fitting they lent their names in praise. The fully realized teens in some of the story are such a great (and if there is justice, intentional) counterpoint to the vapid YA supernatural teen genre. I will be reading me some more Link.

After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
Murakami is a constant favorite, and I'm regretting slowly running out of his works to read. While I always feel I'm missing a little bit of the cultural context of Japan needed to really get elements of his novels, they usually touch deeply on something universal enough to human experience to make them relatable across that boundary. This collection of short stories takes various looks at the intangible, personal shock waves of a 1995 earthquake in Kobe on his characters. The quake is a guiding theme in exploring their own deeper personal turbulences, from the tragic to the absurd (giant crime-fighting frog!).

Good Birders Don't Wear White - Lisa White
Ostensibly a collection of anecdotal strategies, tips, stories, etc. from birders, it was mostly a skim read. There were a couple of well written bits, but most of it was basic level tips, somewhat lame attempts at humor, and just dry writing. Enough said.

The Son - Phillip Meyer
A Texas take on the classic generational empire novel, Son was enjoyable, but seemed caught between whether it wanted to accent traditional western elements, or more literary character development. It didn't ever really successfully meld the two for me. The story of Texas oil and cattle families was a fun read, with some nice changes to the typical trope, but it felt a little washed out for such an ambitious scale. I also never really got the sense of place that crowds into similar novels like Annie Proulx's Barkskins. That being said, any disappointment was only that a really good novel missed some chances to be great, still leaving a decent read in its wake.

Sharpe's Tiger - Bernard Cornwell
I grew up watching a lot of PBS (being one of 3 channels we got in the North Country at the time), so I got to live through a lot of truly fantastic period piece shows (varying runs of Masterpiece Theater, Robin of Sherwood, etc.) One of my favorites at the time was the Sharpe's Rifles series, most of which focused on and around the British involvement in the Peninsular War and other period conflicts. I had never read any of the source materials, so I gave it a shot. In general the series (see subsequent entries in this list) is certainly not the pinnacle of literature, but its focus on the rise and ambition of its namesake antihero (in a very real sense of the word) echoes similar (albeit slightly better) historical series like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. It's high adventure, and damsels in distress, and war, but without the pompous fawning over the British Empire of Kipling and his contemporaries. The ground-level view of the machine of British imperialism may still have some banners of over-glorification strapped to it, but this is a grittier, more nuanced context that matches its not-so-selfless protagonist.

Sharpe's Triumph - Bernard Cornwell
Same as the last entry, with 20% more of everything. 'Splosions! Also, is there a more British name than "Bernard Cornwell"?

Hero of the Empire - Candice Millard
While I was slogging through India with Sharpe on the prior two entries, I came across this interesting historical bit on a supposedly key excerpt from the life of young Winston Churchhill. The account of his service in South Africa, capture, and "daring escape", was passingly interesting, but any soft of lessons drawn from that experience on his future career seem tacked on as an afterthought. The bulk of the book is on that one part of his life, with very little buildup or follow-through. It felt like a single, somewhat poorly scripted episode of Young Indiana Jones (remember that, kids of the 80s?). If you want a good bio on Churchhill, my guess is this is not the place to start.

The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin
Last year I read The Fifth Season on a friend's recommendation, and enjoyed its weird sciencey-fictiony-geology-based-apocalyptic bent. Gate and Sky are the other two books in the series. Generally I am not a fan of the current obsession with trilogies (especially among the YA set), but this series was worth the read. The world-building is masterful, with an interesting take on magic-but-not-magic-but-maybe-magic? as a function of connection with primal geologic forces. While it could have devolved from there, Jemisin spends a lot of time fleshing out the culture, politics, and minutia of her weird, traumatized societies. While not antiheroes, per se, her protagonists are flawed, no one gets an unblemished happy ending, etc. There were a couple looseish ends, but the sheer ambition of the novel makes up for it. Not going to win the Mann Booker prize (though it did score the Hugo and Nebula awards..), but very engaging and unique in a very derivative genre.  Definitely not sparkly-vampire-werewolf-whatever fare.

Future Home of the Living God – Louise Erdrich
I am a longtime fan of Erdrich, so your mileage may vary on this one. A marked distancing of her existing body of contemporary Native American fiction, Future Home is a near-future fictional commentary on rising moral extremism. Much like The Handmaid's Tale, the focus is on the subjugation of women as breeding machines, though the details differ a bit. It was rightfully criticized as being a little too derivative of Tale, but I liked that it began pre-dystopia, and Erdrich's characteristic artful and subtle prose really capture the slow slide of a democracy into fascism and then dark theocracy. It loses points for originality, but blows Tale out of the water in terms of style and prose.

Manhattan Beach - Jennifer Egan
After reading A visit from the Goon Squad last year and being mostly underwhelmed, and uncertain how it rated the accolades it received, Manhattan Beach was a pleasant surprise. The Depression/WWII era novel follows several interelated characters involved in the war effort, organized crime, etc. Some of the characters are a little two-dimensional, but the interactions and unique human moments Egan manages to squeeze out of them made for a good read. Still nowhere near the accolades for Goon Squad but a much more enjoyable read.

The Slow Regard of Quiet Things - Patrick Rothfuss
Unfortunately, Rothfuss's Kingkiller series (see The Wise Man's Fear above) remains without a third novel. Slow Regard was a short interlude that followed a secondary character doing...basically nothing. Literally, it was mostly a day in the neurotic life of sort of deal. The whole book was just a delving into the character's damage, but not in a meaningful or even explanatory way. I get that it was a personal book for Rothfuss, what he wanted to write, but it just came off as inconsequential. The upside was that the audiobook was narrated by Rothfuss himself.

The Good Lord Bird - James McBride
McBride's best work so far is a fictional account of the abolitionist John Brown's campaign against slavery, from the viewpoint of a young African American boy, who spends the better part of the story in drag as part of Brown's ragtag army. The novel is subversive without being polemic, casting shade at any number of historical idols. Brown gets a complex treatment both tilting at windmills but also a madman who more embodies true principle, however insane, then traditional heroes like Frederick Douglass (who gets practically skewered). McBride doesn't shy away from satire at the expense of all sides, with a greater message that seems to revolve around the very human, fallible, and self-deceiving nature of humanity as it plays out in social struggle.

Sharpe's Rifles - Bernard Cornwell
Another of the Sharpe's series described above. Enjoyable, but I still think I like the TV series better.

Hellboy Omnibus - Mike Mignola
Before Hellboy became a series of movies, cartoons, etc. of varying quality, it was an oddly beautiful series of graphic novels. Mignola has a flair for austere, understated storytelling which may seem odd to say of an epic involving a cigar chomping demon who spends no small amount of time punching things. His story starts, it progresses, and it comes to its inevitable end. Mignola creates a modern hero archetype even as he draws from a deep well of mythos. I counted this because the saga really is what a graphic novel should be...a self-contained, finite story that is best suited for a visual form.

The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King
A side-quest in the chronology of the Dark Tower series, Keyhole follows young Roland Deschain on a diversion shortly after the events of Wizard and Glass. It was an enjoyable mini-adventure, but really didn't add anything to the primary story, and felt a little tacked on. However, I enjoyed the young Roland parts of the story far more than the old Roland parts, so I didn't mind an extended reverie in the past.

Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
This was easily one of my favorite books of the past six months. Sing is an artfully told story of family struggle as a lens on contemporary racial struggle, but without a heavy hand. At heart it's a literary boiler room, telling an increasingly claustrophobic tale of a mixed race couple, their children, and their community, all in decay and free-fall. Jesmyn adds a touch of magical realism with ghosts as a plot device, but it's handled deftly and doesn't deter from the power of her characters. It interweaves seamlessly with the more abstract ghosts of the characters pasts and traumas. An exceptional read.

Hiroshima - John Hersey
I don't know how I managed not to read this post-war examination of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It seems like the sort of book that gets over-prescribed to freshman English classes or college Sociology intro sessions. Hiroshima is a critical evaluation of the impacts of the bombing told through the eyes of 6 survivors. From the incredible scenes of carnage to the chilling tiny details, the power of the book is in translating an event that happened on a scale we can't fathom into real, tangible people. What amazed me is that the book originally debuted in 1946, in a world still steeped in propaganda. I can't imagine what an incredible blow to the zeitgeist it must have been for the average reader at the time.

A Day Afield

Hole in the Prairie

Once in a great while I get to shake off the shackles of cubicle confinement and get out into the field. A week ago I joined some team members on the western edge of our region, to help uninstall some monitoring equipment along the San Bernard River. It was dirty, exhausting, physical work. I loved every minute of it. As much as I enjoy what I do, I think I would be a good deal happier if more of it took place outdoors. 

Muddy boots, good day.

Our monitoring sites were deep into rural areas west of Houston. The sort of places where you can feel the tight mental personal space of the city expand to fill a broader horizon. Also the sort of places with pretty great wildlife and photographic opportunities. We spent all day deep in farm fields, and rural streams, and in the medians of country highways.  While most of me was focused on the task at hand, there is always lurking within that 10 year old explorer with wandering eyes.  As we rooted out concrete emplacements, I noted bird calls in the morning woods. As we dug up buried cable, my labored breath enjoyed the clean air. While taking pictures of the site for reference, I snuck in a few of the local sights as well. 

Old tractor

 

Rust/paint

Lone tree road

Vesper Sparrows

 At the end of the day, there was just enough time to stop by Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge on my way home. Attwater is a big sweep of land with big Texas skies and the gentle roll between prairie and river bottom. The big attraction to many is the endangered bird who lends its name and purpose to the Refuge, but for me the vast, expansive feeling of the refuge gives a sense of what the land might once have been. Complete with creaking Aermotor windmills, blowing prairie grasses, and circling hawks, it's far closer to the stereotype of Texas most have than the busy urban swamp of Houston. While it doesn't have the dense natural beauty of the mountains and lakes of my homeland in upstate NY, it does have an austere beauty of its own. 

Northern Harrier over prairie grasses

Road, meet sky

Hawk sees you

Raptor exclusion

Sunset tree

Bird on a wire (Savannah Sparrow)

Prairie depression(al wetland)

Last light on prairie grasses

Mom and Magritte

My mother was a fan of the artist Rene Magritte. I'm not certain why, especially, since her tastes ran toward Impressionists and realistic art over the bowler hatted surrealism of Magritte. But one of her favorite paintings was Magritte's Dominion of Light (or Empire of Light, actually a series of related paintings). It remains one of my favorites as well. I recently took my oldest daughter, who never got to meet mom, to a local art museum that has one of the Dominion paintings. I tried to explain to her what it mean to be in the room with that painting, and how it was my mother's favorite, and also mine. I don't know if she understood, or if she really registered it, but she held my hand while we stood and looked at it for a while and that was enough.

Dominion of Light, Rene Magritte, 1954

First of the Year Hike

Sunrise on the Katy Prairie

I have a longstanding tradition of getting out for a hike on the first day of the year. The Houston area is not gifted with obvious natural beauty like majestic mountains, or vast primeval forests, or even, you know, topography. That being said there are some wild places left one can find and appreciate with patience.

The Katy Prairie, or what remains of it, is one of those places. One the western edge of Houston, between the city and the Brazos River Valley lies a large swath of what was once native tallgrass prairie and wetlands covering over a thousand square miles. In its current form, it is a rapidly developing area (the black humor among conservationists is that the most common structure on the prairie are "for sale" signs) of agricultural lands, with some remnant or restored prairie areas. Even in a state far from what must have been a sweeping landscape of coastal grasslands and marshes, the Prairie is still an impressive landscape. Equally impressive is the rate and mostly wildcat nature of development pushing into it. It is an oddly poignant feeling to be on site for the disappearance of an ecosystem. Not that it doesn't have its advocates. The Katy Prairie Conservancy has made great strides in preserving and restoring invaluable pieces of the area. But in the face of distribution centers the size of city-states of yore, massive master-planned communities, and the general press of Houston's swelling population, the Prairie's future is nebulous.

For Sale!

Among the many riches of the prairie are the abundance of bird life there.  Migratory waterfowl and prairie birds swarm through its open areas. Innumerable flocks of Snow Geese, Sandhill Cranes, and blackbirds pass through and stop over in the area. Even in an area rich in avifauna, being located smack dab on the continental entry point of the Central Migratory Flyway, the prairie is especially treasured by wildlife enthusiasts. Which only goes to underline the tremendous loss its unrestrained development represents.

Snow Geese in Flight

I got a last minute invitation from a friend to join one of their teams on a late Audubon Christmas Bird Count for Cypress Creek, one of my project watersheds at work. Get up ridiculously early on the first day of the new year, to muck through cold, boot high water in marshes, and count birds? For Science?

Yes, please.

So well before dawn I kissed my half-asleep wife goodbye, slapped on some knee-high rubber boots, and hit the road. The hurried arrangements I had made had me meeting a couple birders at a lake sometime before dawn to watch waterfowl come in for the morning. As I drove through the dark, roughly-paved backroads of the Prairie, the inky-black stand of trees around me seemed to reach out a form against  lightening sky. A Great Horned Owl sat atop a lonely telephone post. A damn good first bird of the year. I pulled the car over, and listened in the hush. I couldn't see the owl, only its black silhouette on the only slightly less dark indigo of the sky, but I could tell from its movements it was watching me. It stayed, and I stayed. For a few minutes there was just a swirl of prairie wind, and darkness, the owl, and me.

With our meeting time looming, I reluctantly got back in the car and drove to our rendezvous. On the way, birds of all manner shot out from the road to fence lines, or blazed briefly in my headlights. The sheer number of them was astounding, like driving through clouds of insects on a hot summer day. As I drove, the prairie fire of morning blazed across the eastern horizon .

Moon, Planet, Fire, Earth

The small lake was motionless that morning, as we watched ducks circle down and plow into the glass of its surface (I would like to say something more poetic like the ducks lighted effortlessly on the water, but, well, they're ducks.) The trees and grasses around us erupted in birdsong, so many species that it was impossible to pick out any one at a time for the sheer cacophony. Armadas of Sandhill Cranes bugled their way across the horizon, and flights of ducks passed endlessly overhead. Raptors sluggishly heaved themselves into the early morning air, and sparrows darted like arrows back and forth in the brush.

Prairie Lake Morning

Savannah Sparrow in Morning Light

Gadwall Drake

Sedge Wren in Prairie Grasses

The rest of the morning was a blur of wading through knee-deep water in marshes, and hiking deep into old farming properties with a congenial group of birders. It is always humbling to me to walk and learn with people who have such fantastic stores of natural knowledge and such willingness to impart it on others. The highlight of the trip was exploring an old barn and finding two Barn Owls peering down on us from above. All in all our small mile-square area recorded about 70 species in only four hours of birding. I had to beg off at lunch to get back to my family, but it was an energizing start to the year.

Old Barn

      

Solitary Tree                                           Rust

 

Barn Owls in Barn                                               Kingfisher in Flight

Sentinel Cows

Farmscape

Book reviews, July to December 2018

In the end, I didn't quite make my book a week goal. Or my four books a month goal. Or my "sleep like a normal human being goal", which is directly related to the two prior goals. I did, however, make it through a decent heap of books (42). If you only give one book from this list a shot, it should be either The Underground Railroad or The God of Small Things. Or, if you're a masochist with excellent taste, The Unconsoled.

The Ancestry of John Whitney – Henry Melville

So you know how every family tree has a few nefarious characters whose lives make tremendously entertaining reading? John Whitney was not one of them. It was interesting to find out that the Whitneys in my line are THE Whitneys, descended from John, the ur-Whitney of American Whitneys. But like the early bits of the bible, there was a lot of begatting and lineage, and not a lot of story. It would probably have been more entertaining if Herman, rather than Henry, Melville wrote it. 

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I'd never read anything by Mitchell, so this story of interconnected lives across expanses of time (from a 18th century whaler to a post-apocalyptic tribesman) was a pleasant surprise. The writing is literary without being too dense for the genre, and the book's forwards and backwards structure, in which the first half of each epoch's story is told, and then the second halves, working backwards through time, doesn't feel as gimmicky as it might in less well-structured works. 

The Master Butcher's Singing Club - Louise Erdrich

Most of what I've read by Erdrich has been her more recent, more accomplished works (The Round House, A Plague of Doves, LaRose). While they differ in tone and structure, they all weave around realities of contemporary Native American communities, with a touch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque magical realism. This departure of a novel of immigrant life in the plains in WWI era North Dakota seems to be most commonly described by critics as "ambitious". Unlike some of the more tight, almost claustrophobic spaces of her other works, this mixtures of characters and stories spanning decades sometimes loses the ability to spend adequate time fleshing out each character's experience. Annie Proulx might have been able to ram robust life experiences into this many characters and events, but for Erdrich it seems like a stretch. It sometimes feels a bit archaic in style, while still enjoying Erdrich's beautiful prose. Not in league with her other recent works, but still a great book in its own right.

Dragon's Teeth - Michael Crichton

The more I read of Crichton, the less I like him. The premise of the semi-historical fiction follows a young student in the employ of competing paleontologists in the frontier of the American West. The real life exploits of Cope and Marsh, and others, in the early boom of paleontology seem like great fodder, but Chrichton doesn't really add much by making this a fictional account. The only interesting bits are the hints at the actual conflict between the two bone collectors, with the tacked on fictional elements feel hacky and rushed (and pretty similar in parts to the superior, but also so-so The Revenant). I'd skip it and get a non-fiction work on the same topic. 

The Wizard and Glass - Steven King

The fourth in the Dark Tower series (think, cowboy D&D), Wizard gets back to a little of the expansive world-building King engaged in in Gunslinger. Much of the novel is backstory for the main protagonist, and is honestly much better storytelling than the primary story. The excellent graphic novel adaption by Jae Lee and others tackles this material first, making for a much better progression. I'm still along for the ride, for now. 

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

Things has been on my bookshelf a good long time. I don't know why I never got around to reading it. This novel of twins growing up in India is fantastically dense and, if a word could even describe a book...fragrant. It's rich in language and story, like a sumptuous meal. Even though I know I must be missing a lot of cultural context, the universality of the emotion and story here are more than enough to float me along. It's a challenging read in places, as the time frame skips around in less than linear fashion, but it really is, to rack up as many cliches as I can in one review, like a beautiful tapestry arising from disparate threads.    

The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro

Did you ever have one of those dreams/nightmares where you have to be somewhere or do something, but you keep getting hung up on little minor inconveniences, one after another, or can't find your way, or otherwise keep getting diverted from where you need to be, or you need to go but all your belongings are all over the floor, and no matter how hard you try you can't get them all picked up? I have that sort of dream a lot. It's not a scary dream like being chased by something monstrous, it's just the creeping horror of everyday inconveniences and minor failures and annoyances. The Unconsoled is essentially an incredibly huge novel that encapsulates that dream experience with such skill that it feels physically uncomfortable to read. Ishiguro is my favorite author whose name isn't Cormac McCarthy, and maybe even just favorite author, period. His deftness and subtlety and endless ability to lay open the delusion and fallibility of our perceptions is unmatched in contemporary fiction. Novels like Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills are master classes in writing. Maybe that's why The Unconsoled vexes me to no end. It's at the same time a work of skill that rivals Remains and most other modern fiction,and also an incredibly painful and horrible book to read. The novel nominally follows a famous musician's visit to a European town to perform in a music festival. But the narrative follows dream logic, he never quite gets where he needs to go, there's always some distraction, places aren't where they should be, characters are inconsistent, timelines are unreliable. A door in one place opens into somewhere else removed which makes perfect sense in a dream but not in reality. However, the story is never so nonlinear that we get to lay down that horrible tension of reality, nor is it ever consistent enough to give us an anchoring point. It's scary the degree to which Ishiguro subtly and slowly pulls the narrator through this (in typical Ishiguro fashion) delusional world of unreliable narration and mounting frustration. I won't give away the ending other to say that there is no release from the tension. It was incredibly frustrating and unenjoyable to read while at the same time being the only book I read these 6 months that really rose to the level of the very best of writing. I love/hate Ishiguro for this powerful, awful book. 

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

I had held on to this novel for a year or so waiting for a good time to read it. I'm glad I waited because it feels especially relevant given the national horror we're slogging through. Railroad is at once a straight ahead, densely literary story of runaway slaves in the American South, and also oddly seamlessly a symbolic metaphor driven condemnation of slavery and its ongoing. The oddness is in what originally struck me as gimmicky; the re-imagining of the underground railroad as a literal series of underground railroad. But Colson builds this indelibly into the udnerlying metaphor and sweep of the story. It's not fantasy, it's not alternative history, it's dense symbolism overlaid on a well-paced story. It reminded me a lot of Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom! in tone, while having its own contemporary voice. The novel pulls no punches in its depiction of the minute and visceral details of the abysmal horror of slavery, but still pulls things into a powerful whole. 

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

Here is the geekiest lead-in to why I read a book I have probably ever written: I keyed into Rothfuss because he was a recurring guest participant in an ongoing live D&D game hosted by the creators of webcomic Penny Arcade. Yeah. Not quite like picking up Erdrich because you heard her work reviewed on NPR's All Books Considered. Rothfuss is a boisterous, irrepressible wit in person, and there seemed to be a lot of buzz in the fantasy world about his books, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This first novel in the series (usually a warning bell for me, given the unfortunate preponderance of series based novels these days) is witty and ambitious, if not literary. The ambiguously archaic setting of the novel revolves around a young outsider coming to a school for magic while being bedeviled by a great evil and ...well that sounds pretty damn derivative. But Rothfuss manages to make it fun, new, and engaging without being simplistic. His wit is sly and pokes through rather than dominating the action. The protagoinist is more anti-hero than paragon, and Rothfuss generally avoids the Mary Sue trap, allowing his protragonist to fail, and be imperfect without immediate resolution on occasion. While the archetype might shout POTTER!, it weaves a nimble path that often steers more closely to Tolkein and Piers Anthony. The pacing is spotty in places, but it was entertaining enough that I picked up the second in the series. There's some seriously cool structural elements to his world-building that I can't wait to see fleshed out.    

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is a guilty pleasure. I know his books are straight ahead stories, and often leave a bit to be desired, even masterworks like Grapes of Wrath. But there's some piece of his writing that is just intractably bound up in the fabric of the country, no matter how much his works are mangled to death in high school English classes and looked down upon for their sometimes simple and moralistic structure by post-modernity. I somehow managed to never read East of Eden, and I regret it. While it suffers from some of the usual Steinbeck glurge in places, it's a lot of his other works (The Long Valley, etc.) seem like practice runs at the much broader, more powerful Eden. This novel of generational families in WWI era California farming communities vacillates back and forth between being an allegorical adaptation of Cain and Abel, and its own unique world. It manages it deftly, and heavily underlies Steinbeck's prescience about social justice issues. Some of the typical complaints about racially problematic bits of the book (the stereotypical "chinaman" Lee) seem misread to me. Steinbeck is not subtle about using these pieces as places on which to drive home a moral point, and in no ambiguity. It's in fashion to dismiss Steinbeck because of his popularity or simple structure, but I think there's a lot of that critique rooted in the fashion of novelty and recentism. Eden has an underlying darkness and moral ambiguity that stands out for Steinbeck. 

City of Mirrors - Justin Cronin

I almost didn't pick this third novel in a somewhat overplayed post-apocalyptic/sparkly vampire genre. The first novel in the series had been fairly well paced and made some brave moves across time periods. The second got bogged down in bad pacing and sterile set piece conflicts. Mirrors was a move back in the right direction. It's not complicated; a straight-ahead fantasy/sci-fi work where, unsurprisingly, it's still humanity vs. sparkly vampires and, of course, itself. But Cronin's ability to make big moves and dramatic reversals is on display, even in its often awkward maneuvering of story lines. The main resolution feels a bit hacky, but it was good to put the series to rest in a fairly satisfying way. 

Meddling Kids - Edgar Contero

I saw this book in line at a book store (the demise of which at the hands of millenials is still, apparently, somewhat exaggerated). I thought it was going to be sort of a fun "After the music" sort of take on Scooby Doo. Something along the lines of The Venture Brothers' absolutely brilliant skewering of Johnny Quest, etc. After finishing it ....I'm still not sure what to make of it? It vacillates back and forth between being a send up of Scooby Doo, trying to be a story in its own right, being an none-too-subtle homage to Lovecraftian Horror, and another fourth of I-don't-even-know-what. There are bits that are enjoyable but it never really gelled as a work. It couldn't decide if it just wanted to be a parody, or to be its own work, and was in the limbo in between. Cantero's prose and clever language play is actually pretty witty, just not sure this was the vehicle for it. 

Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories - H.P. Lovecraft

After slogging through Meddling Kids (above), I thought I'd go back and read some of its source material. I'd only read the titular story in this collection of horror stories of eldritch other-worldly horrors, so I thought I'd re-read it and other works, maybe just to cleanse my palate from Kids. Cthulhu is like the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...it sets the tone for a cult following and reaches tendrils into a much broader universe (including things like Mike Mignola's classic Hellboy series which spot-on nails the Lovecraftian horror feel), but when you go back and re-experience it after the world has broadened it seems a little...less. I had forgotten that this foundation of countless pop culture references and a whole subgenre of horror is really really short and anticlimactic. The other stories have a similar tone ("creepng dread"), but don't really stand out. It all felt a lot more like pulpy horror comics than literature. Still, sometimes it's good to go back to the source.  

True North - Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison is an author I often enjoy, but also one of the most problematic for me. Works like Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog are excellent examples of his range between austere, sense-of-place epic novel(la)s, and his inherently-faulty-human-nature grittier works. There is a too-prevalent, too-graphic Lolita theme through A LOT of his works that is profoundly uncomfortable (to the extent that I cheered the death of one of his ongoing protagonists just so I would have to wade through the sewer of his particular stories anymore). True North is a generational story of a logging family and a son's obsessive attempt to atone for the crimes of his family against community and specific people. It's a masterful blend of Harrison's two competing genres, and is greater than their sum. A fallible but well-intentioned protagonist and a densely woven background of supporting characters are all firmly enmeshed in the Harrison's beloved-but-oft-abused setting of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 

Calypso - David Sedaris

No one writes dysfunction and anti-glamour like David Sedaris. While some of his recent works lacked the wit and drive of earlier books, Calypso is mostly back-on point. It's primarily a collection of family bits and pieces, most darkly comical, some a bit heartbreaking, but all Sedaris in good form. The ability to make you wince inwardly at awkwardness of family interactions is part of Sedaris' ability to touch something universal in our experience. 

When the Emperor Was Divine - Julie Otsuka

This novel of a Japanese family's shifting experiences in internment camps in WWII was Otsuka's debut piece (to be followed later by the frenetic energy and sweep of the more successfully executed Buddha in the Attic). While her spare but elegant writing is already on display, it doesn't quite meet the challenge of the structure which has the story handed off at different intervals to be told by another character;s voice. Mother to daughter to son to father. It's still handled well, and is a reminder of the deep betrayal of Japanese internment on a personal level without being a polemic. Otsuka stretches her voice a little in places, but it's still a moving work with her eye for little revelatory details and unfortunate modern relevance. 

Gumption: relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers - Nick Offerman

I admit, I'm generally an Offer-fan, even beyond his turn on Parks and Recreation. I'm even a fan of some of his audiobook work (like his performance on Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo). That being said I've been really disappointed with his own books. I read Paddle Your Own Canoe earlier in the year, and while it had standout moments, really descended into a morass of Hollywood name-dropping and plodding tangents. Gumption fails in its own, uniquely spectacular way. Ostensibly a book about American paragons of values of self-reliance and trouble-making etc, it makes it about 6 (of 21) pieces in before it completely unravels. The first couple chapters are pretty tight, but Offerman makes a massive jump ignoring most of American History since the Revolution other than not-surprising detours to T. Roosevelt, and spend the vast majority of the book on either artisans he knows personally, or Hollywood personalities that are really, really a stretch to include in a book of gumption-enhanced Americans (Yoko Ono? Laurie Anderson? Really?). It really feels like he phoned much of the book rather than finish the book at hand. Don't get me wrong, Offerman is hilarious in the good bits and has an unexpectedly (though sometimes overused) broad vocabulary, but the intent and content of the book seem at odds. Even some of the maxims he lays on us feel a little glurge-y. His overly-personal selection of people to profile is problematic as much for its lack of relevance to most people outside showbiz, as it is in the heavy-hitters it leaves out. If you want gutsy troublemakers, are you really saying Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and Tom Laughlin did more to relight the torch of freedom than, say, Martin Luther King, Susan B Anthony, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, et al? I like Offerman but his arts and entertainment focus here is really askew from the broader theme of the book. 

Leftovers

In typical style, I started but have not yet finished several works, including a re-read of Anna Karenina, Rothfuss's second novel Wise Man's Fear, Julie of the Wolves (with my daughter Lydia), and Perry's The Essex Serpent.