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. 

Book Reviews, January to June 2018

Another six months, another pile of books. So far, I’m at my goal of a book a week. I’m fully aware that in some part I’m reading to the list, but like many things in life, I’ve settled into a comfortable habit, so here we go. If you only give one book from this list a shot, it should be either Lincoln in the Bardo or LaRose.

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

The first book I read this year was arguably the best. Saunders’ Bardo is an “experimental” reflection on a short period in Lincoln’s life following the death of his young son, and the ghosts of the Bardo graveyard in which he is interred. The style bounces between pathos and subtle wit, including a passage about a party at the Lincoln’s composed completely of short overlapping and wildly varying accounts from guests that feels right at home in our post-truth era. I think my enjoyment was enhanced in having listened to this as an audiobook, with an ensemble cast that included sublime performances by Nick Offerman and David Sedaris.

Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami

Murakami is in his element in this collection of short stories, gently prying into the messy organics of individual relationships and the broader relationships between men and women. As usual with Murakami, I feel like I’m missing a little in cultural translation, but I’m still left with a deftly- constructed set of vignettes.  

Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow

I’m continuing to make my way through Doctorow’s works, and Book of Daniel is certainly the high-water mark so far. Nominally it’s a fictionalization of the Rosenberg trials and executions, but this starting point splits into two mutual tracks; Doctorow drags his characters through a background of the turbulent history of the time, while also colliding family members against each other in claustrophobic orbits.  

Hamilton – Ron Chernow

It was hard to come at Hamilton after the spectacle of the musical and picking this up and setting it down a couple times. While Chernow gets credit for starting the Hamilton “revolution”, this tome seems to fall short in a lot of ways. The pacing and continuity is a bit inconsistent, and Chernow makes some leaps of supposition that really seem a bit stretched. It was helpful to get a fuller backstory, but I didn’t come away impressed by Chernow’s writing.

Barkskins – Annie Proulx

Barkskins is the embodiment of a traditional epic. It follows two family dynasties, one white and one Native/Metis, set against the clash of cultures and the clash of men with wilderness, spanning centuries from the early fur trade to the modern era. As usual, Proulx’s characters are vibrant and complex. Even minor players have backstories that could be novels in and of themselves (though not as densely packed as in Accordion Crimes). Proulx remains one of my favorite American authors.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – George RR Martin

Ok, so this is fluff. Profoundly fluffy fluff. Not even fluff in its own regard, but side story fluff from Martin’s Game-of-Thronesaverse. I needed an audiobook for a long ride, and this was what was available at quick search. The story is a prequel to the GoT storyline, following the development of some characters-before-they-were-characters. It wasn’t bad per se, just relatively forgettable. I do give Martin credit for keeping the story fairly reined in, rather than his usual ridiculousness of disjointedly moving over weighted companies of characters aimlessly across landscapes.

Moonglow – Michael Chabon

Chabon’s Moonglow has been sitting on my bedside table for a little while, and I finally got to it. Moonglow is a family story in the truest sense; a mix of facts and elaboration. It is a retelling of the life of Chabon’s grandfather in post-war America, and is a mirror for the epochs through which he drifted. At its heart it’s a story about stories, like an old Kodachrome picture of families on vacation, though in this case the picture is of rockets and alligators and old age. The nuance and tragedy get mixed in the fuzzy, warm color cast of history. As usual with Chabon, the dialogue is worth the price of admission. It’s not as dense and atmospheric as Kavalier and Klay, but it’s Chabon doing what he does well…reflecting the subject and time in his style, telling the story not in just the content but the color of the writing.

LaFayette in the Somewhat United States – Sarah Vowell

Throughout Hamilton I found myself being more interested in LaFayette than Hamilton himself. Vowell’s work came recommended, but it fell a little short for me. In all fairness, I know it wasn’t intended as an exhaustive biography of “America’s favorite fighting Frenchmen” (now that’s in your head for the rest of the day. You’re welcome). It feels like Vowell can’t decide if she’s focusing on Hamilton, or using Hamilton as a lens to look at the struggling new American democracy. In the end, Lafayette ends up being a poor mix of both. It has some great bits, but for better or worse feels like an over-extended This American Life segment. I keep expecting quirky musical breaks between segments. I’d recommend reading this as opposed to listening to the audiobook. Vowell’s voice and comic timing are less than enthralling.

The Fifth Season – N.K. Jemisen

I had expected this sci fi/fantasy bit to be another bit of fluff between weightier works, but was pleasantly surprised (within bounds). Jemisen’s world building is like fan fic for geologists. Instead of the typical werewolf/vampire/angel YA trilogy ridiculousness, the world is structured around geologic forces, the people who wield them like arcane power, and the societal structures that surround it. If Fifth Season starts as a bit derivative of Asimov’s Nightfall, it quickly carves out its own unique niche. The writing is not literature-grade; it’s straight ahead storytelling without much stylistic ornament, but it’s adequate to the task of conveying a unique world vision.

Pulse – Julian Barnes

Much like Murakami’s Japanese characters, I often feel I’m missing some of the nuance of Barnes’ British denizens and settings. His style is masterful, even though he strays a bit farther into dryness and understatement for my tastes. This collection of short stories clashes between quintessentially British dialogue/patter at dinner parties and vignettes of somewhat darker themes than Barnes’ other works. It feels like a take on the dissolution of society playing out in the deteriorating lives of the characters, all overlaid with the false joviality of the dinner party vignettes. It could not be more British if it were a Bulldog draped in the Union Jack, wearing a bowler hat and a monocle.  

Paddle Your Own Canoe – Nick Offerman

I’ve liked Offerman’s writing in the past, and after his performance in Saunders’ Lincoln (above) I picked up the audiobook for Canoe. It started out well, with a great mix of irreverence, Ron Swanson-esque self-reliance stories, but then towards the middle it felt like he ran out of content and started talking about Hollywood, name-dropping, and swooning over his wife for several interminable chapters. It ends on a high note with the eponymous poem, but it really could have its center eviscerated and be a better experience.

Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West – Tom Clavin

I’m not sure why exactly I picked this up, but it was an interesting read. It’s a straight-ahead history of Earp/Masterson before and after their Dodge City days. I was hoping Clavin would give a little more context on Dodge City and the period itself, but he spent most of his time on the aimless wanderings of the lawmen involved. It was an account full of character without going into the sensationalism of other period Western works like Gywnne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. 

LaRose – Louise Erdrich

This story of white and Native families and the complex bindings of mixed communities is Erdrich at her best. Mixing a touch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “magical realism” with her traditional style of story-telling, Erdrich creates a very human work that escapes the “magical Indian” trap of other authors (and if we’re being fair, some of Erdrich’s lesser works). The story revolves around the son of one family being “given” to another family as reconciliation for the tragic accidental killing of their son. The way in which Erdrich takes a seemingly implausible arrangement and plays it out in ways that feel organic speak to the depth of her skill. You feel the weight of her characters’ loss, their own internal conflict over the son-swapping decision, and the way in which ordinary life goes on and things become the new normal despite our internal worlds being torn apart.  Erdrich balances writing about the unique aspects of modern life on and near a reservation with the universal experiences of average people in an almost seamless manner. The dialogue between LaRose’s two sisters interspersed throughout the book is almost worth the price of admission itself.

Calling of the Three – Steven King

I had unexpectedly enjoyed King’s first foray into the cowboy D&D of his Dark Tower universe last year, and finally picked up the second volume. It was underwhelming. It drifted from the superb slow reveal of Roland’s “world that has moved on” to a plodding introduction of what can only be described as stereotypes on parade. Even giving King the benefit of the doubt in his touching-on-problematic writing of the split personality of a woman of color that seems drawn from the absolute worst of blaxploitation cinema, the added characters here are hokey. The entire book revolves around Roland collecting destined allies to accompany him on his journey, and the interposition of different eras of America with his “alien” world just feels too jarring. I’m hoping the story improved going forward. It didn’t help that I listened to this as an audiobook with horrible voice acting. 

Wind/Pinball – Haruki Murakami

Wind/Pinball is a collection of Murakami’s earliest works, and, well, it shows. You can feel his style still in development. It is not the masterful writing of later works. That being said, the interlocked stories of the two novels (part of a three-novel cycle) are still good reads. The first novel (Hear the Wind Sing) is probably the lesser of the two halves, and reminds me a lot of Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh…an early effort that will be reflected in later, better works. It feels a little more autobiographical, dealing with a struggling writer.  Pinball, 1973 is a more developed work, touching on obsession from the narrator over a pinball machine. Both novels touch on a continuing theme of Murakami’s, the suicidal death of a female character. The heavy focus on suicide throughout his works is one of those Murakami elements I feel like I’m not as tuned into because of cultural differences. 

The Antelope Wife – Louise Erdrich

Antelope was an interesting follow-up to LaRose and other Erdrich works. Erdrich typically has touches of storytelling that transcend “reality”, but generally stays firmly rooted in the real, human experiences of her characters.  This work that centers on a devolving relationship and the tragic consequence of a suicide attempt (mirroring Erdrich’s partner’s own suicide) tilts more heavily toward the mythology. The story cuts back and forth between the far past and present, tracing the roots of the turbulent forces that driver her characters, and Erdrich’s style follows suit. The passages from the past are told in a traditional storytelling style, heavy with symbol. The modern elements are grittier, more realistic. Erdrich manages to tie it together well.  

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Hemmingway’s Secret Adventures, 1953-1961 – Nicholas Reynolds

Reynolds is a historian working for the CIA and other agencies, but his take on Hemmingway’s clandestine activities during the Cold War was more engaging than I expected. Reynolds paints a complicated picture of Hemmingway’s time as a resistance fighter among the partisans in Spain, through WWII, and into the Cold War. Despite Reynold’s admitted love of Hemmingway, the work paints a nuanced and complicated portrayal of Hemmingway’s warring nature. He is simultaneously the face of bravery and anti-fascism, and also boorish, self-centered, and easily manipulated. For better or worse, Hemmingway’s wartime antics (which include a hilariously over the top stint in which he volunteered to use his personal fishing boat to hunt German submarines in the Caribbean, intending to lure them in and then throw grenades into open hatches- this was an actual thing he tried to do) show a man caught between the perfection of ideals and the imperfection of both the world and himself. Hemmingway is alternately manipulated by the Soviets, the US, the Cubans, and his own self-deception. An interesting if disheartening read for any Hemmingway fan. As much as his work influenced modern American literature, in his personal life he was the sort of dangerous jerk who is full of swagger, but short on thinking things through…a mannerism that is uncomfortably close to the current political climate. The point is driven home to an even greater degree by the Russian manipulation of Hemmingway. One might even say collusion….

The Wastelands – Steven King

The third installment in the Dark Tower series, Wastelands made marginal improvements in redeeming the series from Calling of the Three. Roland’s Ka-tet is on the move, and incorporating more of King’s expansive world. It took a shift toward a little more of the Asimovian sci fi feel as opposed to the dystopian cowboy fantasy elements of The Gunslinger, but at least the story progressed. King’s writing in the voice of a woman of color is still cringeworthy in places. I can only hope the remaining books move back toward the more austere aesthetic of sweeping stretches of time and landscape of the original novel.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil Degrasse Tyson

Purportedly a translation of astrophysics into popular science context, there were a lot of instances in the book that felt like listening to that professor in college who is so deep into the nuance of a particular field that they are completely incapable of teaching an intro-level class that’s relatable. Some of the concepts Tyson covers start with an assumption of scientific literacy that overreaches a bit. I generally enjoyed it, though it didn’t feel very cohesive as a work. I listened to the audiobook on this one, and honestly, I’m not sold on Tyson as a narrator. In parts he just comes off as smug.

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is one of those Important Books everyone is assumed to have read, and that I’ve put off for some time. I appreciated (rather than truly enjoyed) One Hundred Years of Solitude, but wasn’t incredibly motivated to work through Marquez’s works. I enjoyed Love more than I expected to. On its face, the story of unrequited love and turbulent relationships in Columbia of the early 20th century seems like an unadorned period piece, but its relentless picking away at the illusions of overblown romantic love make the main story feel more like a play within a play, with Marquez pointing out the silliness of simplistic romanticism. As with Murakami’s Japanese sojourns, I know I’m missing some meaning in the cultural translation, but there’s enough left to be satisfying. It was interesting to read this after the Hemmingway book, because in parts it echoes some of the same “the Emperor’s clothes are not resplendent” themes, i.e. this is not heroic, this is stupid. 

Bad Dirt - Proulx

Dirt is the second of three installments in the Wyoming Stories collections which started with Close Range (the collection that spawned Brokeback Mountain, among other stories). It’s a mix of stories that steer strongly toward tall tale type characters, often to the detriment of the setting. It doesn’t feel as satisfying or fleshed out as the original collection…like an album of B-sides. That being said, it’s still Proulx, and still enjoyable. There are a few uncharacteristic misses, though, including a story told from the viewpoint of badgers, and one about a portal to Hell, that just don’t meet Proulx’s usual bar. There is a third installment of stories that I have avoided for fear that this franchise is scraping past the bottom of the barrel. 

Warlight – Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje’s prowess in modern literature was recently reflected in winning a best-of edition of the Booker prize, in which The English Patient was selected as the best of previous prize-winners. I was excited when Warlight came out this year, and bumped it to the top of the pile. This story of family secrets and underworld characters in post-war England has some wonderful writing and a great ambiance, but falls a little short of the highwater mark for Ondaatje. In some places it feels like the story is not an adequate framework on which to hang his prose, and in some rare places, vice versa. Still an enjoyable read, but not in the same tier as Patient or Anil’s Ghost. 

A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

Goon Squad was a completely random pick; I heard a colleague talking about it, and it sounded worth a try. The story collection is nominally strung together through a central character, around which a sea of aspiring musicians, drug addicts, and other predators swirl. I was surprised that the critical reaction (Pulitzer prize, etc.) was so positive for this book, which I didn’t particularly get much out of. Part of the fawning reviews seemed to focus on the “experimental” take on some aspects (one chapter is done as a PowerPoint presentation, etc.) but it all felt gimmicky to me (and didn’t, in all fairness, translate well to audiobook). Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was stuck with the “experimental” label as well, but its experimental style served the narrative and was intrinsic to it book’s structure. Goon Squad just felt tired and contrived. It didn’t even seem to have the ambition to be pretentious. I’m still puzzled as to what people got out of this. Neither the stories or the writing really stood out to me at all.

The Historian – Jennifer Egan

Continuing the downward trajectory (though still a better work that Goon Squad), Historian is a modern day take on the Victorian vampire novel. The main story of generations of historians in pursuit of, and being pursued by, a very real and very much somewhat-alive Vlad Tepes. It’s ambitious in scope, and in places the writing is decent, but there are vast stretches of the book that feel like just shuttling characters from one expositional encounter to another. Go to another historian, find another document, lather, rinse, repeat. The anticlimactic climax and the “surprise” ending feel a bit tacked on. SPOILERS BELOW - What really threw me out of the suspension of disbelief (and why I have been picking this up and setting it down for the better part of a decade) were both the nonsensical core of the story, in which Vlad Tepes is simultaneously trying to lure historians to b’e his thrall and manage his book collection while also trying to push them away with threats of harm, and also specific thriller elements that completely break any tension with their silliness. Dracula stalks a historian and, even though no one can resist his undead powers, and he could end the historian with hardly a thought, decides to send a message by killing the historian’s cat. Dracula, Vlad Tepes, unstoppable creature of darkness. Kills a cat. I never got past that ridiculous passage.

Over Sea, Under Stone - Susan Cooper

Ok, so this may not really count, but since I'm the one counting, here it is. Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising cycle of novels is one of my cherished childhood memories. My daughter who's on the verge of 5 is finally of an age where she is capable of sitting through books with no or limited pictures. I took a risk and introduced her to Over Sea as the first book of real substance we have read together (at 250 pages of small type, with only a handful of illustrations, this is a seriously dense book). She's at that transitional point between picture books and starting to read herself, and I'm sure she'll be up to her eyeballs in whatever passes for children's lit these days, so I'm getting in a few classics while I can. The thing I loved about Cooper's books is their austerity, their timelessness, and the way they treat young readers as people, not dumbing down prose with silly names, etc. (looking at you, Rowling. Ok, not really, but a little. Plus I still think Potter is terribly derivative of Copper's Dark is Rising). We got through it, though it took a while, and I think she really liked it and was able to keep up. As with all of Cooper's books, it was a decent (if slightly more dated than Dark is Rising) read rich in British mythos and sense of place. 

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. 

Book reviews, January-June 2017

I debated on whether to make this post. This blog was something I enjoyed for several years. I still love the idea of it. I just have little time for it anymore. I still find myself thinking "hey, I should blog that", but mostly just end up posting it to Facebook (O tempora, o mores). These book lists seem to be the last gasp of what feels increasingly like a private game with the universe. 

This time I'll keep it simple. Here, in no particular order, are the books I read these last 6 months. I loved a few, loathed others (your mileage may vary).

The Drunken Botanist- Amy Stewart

Stewart's exploration of the botannical underpinnings of various alcoholic mixers and elixirs is excellent applied science geekery, at least in concept. Stewart offers a sometimes-insightful look at the connections between the science, history, and alchemy of cocktail ingredients without getting too deep in the weeds in any sphere. Although the descriptions seem to wane in exuberance as the book wears on (and wear on it does...), it's still a worthwhile read. I only wish she’s spent more time on the actual botany.

Wolf Hall - Hillary Mantel

The writing in this work of Tudor-era historical fiction seems like it's better than it needed to be. I don't usually love this genre, but the literature-grade dialogue and interplay between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell is handled deftly and with great deference to its historical superstructure. I admit, I got this on audiobook because I desperately needed something for a long ride, and it was the only thing I could find in a five-minute search of my library's website. That being said, I ended up enjoying it far more than I thought I would.

The Old Ace in the Hole - Annie Proulx

Proulx continues to prove herself a master of place and character. This novel of a wayward son scouting pig farm locations and his interactions with small town characters is less epic in scope and timeline than many of her works. It feels to some degree like an elongated story from one of her Wyoming stories collections. It's a tribute to her writing that a novel in which nothing really much happens, set in a place I don't really care about, was so engaging. It was especially poignant as an illustration of the mindset and psychic landscape of midwest rural America, given current political atmospheres.

Dead Wake - Eric Larson

I keep hoping that Larson will produce another book as entertaining as Devil in the White City, but either his style or the subjects he selects invariably fall short. Dead Wake delves into the time and events surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania, a catalyst for the leadup to American involvement in WWI. For such a turbulent era, and such a momentous event, Larson's book feels more like a shallow summary. Larson does an adequate job of giving a sense of both the zeitgeist through minor characters and details, especially in terms of the German Uboats, but it never feels like he delves deep enough into anything to really provide its flavor. It was readable, but a bit bland given the incredible depth of story and drama the real event surrounded.

Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner

With the exception of As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's work all blend and bleeds at the edges to me. This is, however, not a bad thing, and takes nothing from his work. I just have a hard time commenting on one work without connecting it to everything else. Absalom's allegory of the decay and dissolution of the antebellum south through a near-mythological southern family line is every bit as masterful as The Sound and the Fury (with which it shares a protagonist). The novel manages to encapsulate Faulkner's love/hate relationship with the south without being too on-the-nose in its symbolism. The subtle use of unreliable narrators and stories told from multiple viewpoints, unraveling as the novel goes on, is a nice counterpoint to the near-apocalyptic imagery throughout. I would go so far as to argue that this is a better book for high school English classes than Sound.

A Model World (and Other Stories)– Michael Chabon

Even in this earlier work, Chabon’s flair for dense, kinetic writing is present. None of these short pieces really stands out as a game-changing story in and of itself, but they offer a sampling of things to come. The latter section of coming of age stories cuts to the bone of family dynamics and disruption.  I had to go back and read a synopsis to remember the narratives, but there were several images and sentences that stuck with me. It felt like a literary sketch book rather than solid stories, but one filled with such captivating work that it was nonetheless a satisfying read.

Choke - Pahluniak

The best thing I can say about this novel of sexual addiction and subculture is that it was the least disappointing of the Pahluniak novels I read this year. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the writing, the story, or the shock value. There is some deft satire on selling image to the gullible, some of Pahluniak’s dark humor shines through in places, and there are some poignant themes of rebuilding. Overall it feels like there’s a good story that just didn’t come into focus. 

Blue at the Mizzen – Patrick O’Brian

Last year I read almost all (19!) of O’Brian’s acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin cycle of novels. Blue at the Mizzen is the last, other than an unfinished 21^st novel, of these stories of 1800’s naval life and spy intrigue. The book is lighter on action, which was a little disappointing (as a big knock-down finale would have served the series well). Given that the author didn’t intend this to be the final novel, or to die before continuing the series, this is fairly excusable. Jack Aubrey finally gets his admiralship, Steven Maturin ties of up some loose ends of a multi-novel story arc of South American revolution, and the lives of the characters generally are left on an uplifting note. It continued to be a blend of Jane Austin-esque romance, Joseph Conrad-esque spy intrigue, and straight-up naval battles.

It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis

Yes, I read this along with half the other horrified people in the country this year. Lewis’ story of the growth and eventual downfall of an American fascist government is chilling in the minutia, but fairly heavy-handed in the broader narrative. If we weren’t so busy dealing with a real Buzz Windrip of our own, this book may have been more enjoyable. As it is, it felt more like a redundant reminder than a forewarning. At some point Lewis abandons all subtly and realism in his depiction of the regime’s excesses, which takes away from the underlying strength of the message and devolves into something less relatable and more comical. Real evil is in the conglomeration of minor betrayals.

The Great Leader – Jim Harrison

Harrison is an immensely talented author, but in a very bifurcated way. His more austere, epic works (Legends of the Fall, The River Swimmer, etc) seem almost the work of a different writer than his grittier, excess-of-human-nature stories. The Great Leader is the story of a down-and-out, past his prime detective struggling with banal minutia of divorce, retirement, and drinking/other vices. He cannot let a case go after retirement (the ur-motif of countless police thrillers), and the novel recounts his dogged but wayward pursuit of a cult leader. Everyone in the novel is a collection of human failures, colliding unavoidably in a morass of collected human failure. It’s a tribute to Harrison that what could have been a formulaic thriller instead is elevated by his understated literary prowess. Foremost is his skill at undressing the pretense and romanticism of human experience to lay bare our base natures in a way that creates fully fleshed, imminently fallible characters.

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

I really wanted to like Gilead’s exploration of the clash between harsh realities of segregation, failure, and family ties with quiet theological reflection of a small town minister. But the telling of the stories through the minister’s staid and reserved tone is like making a copy of a vibrant painting with muted watercolors. Robinson’s world is full of intriguing characters, from a radical abolitionist preacher to ne’er do well prodigal sons, but the filtering of their stories through the human equivalent of Nyquil makes their realities unnecessarily gentle. I’m sure there are some deeper reflections on gentleness and submission in faith in the face of the horrors of the world, but the latter never feels fully fleshed, and the former dominates the conversation.

Damned/Doomed – Chuck Pahluniak

The first two books of this unfinished trilogy about the adventures of a deceased teenage girl in a capricious hellscape afterlife left me completely unconcerned as to whether there will ever be a concluding chapter. Pahluniak abandons all subtlty and craft and just piles on poorly written excess after excess. Even his usual dark humor and satire is completely fumbling and unformed. The first novel was passable, but disappointing. The retconning second novel was so poorly executed it managed to retroactively damage the first.  Even the cover art on Doomed seems like they got an intern to sketch something in pencil right before publication.  

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

Ok, so yes, this was another “book to accompany the devolution of the American Democracy” read. That being said, Atwood’s story surprised me with its subtlty and the chilling effect of its small touches. This is not the over-the-top insanity of Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, it’s a novel of claustrophobic horrors and intimate betrayals, slowly revealed. Atwood’s account of a post-apocalyptic future in which fertile women are enslaved to the wealthy as brood mares is equally a commentary on fascism as it is a feminist exploration of control. It could have done either and be satisfying, and could have simply been a sci fi pulp piece and been a good enough premise to be worthwhile. Its strength is not in having a wild premise, but in crafting a world very like our own, just shifted in jarring ways that create a dissonance rather than a shock. What really drew me in was not just the wealth of undertones the story hints at, but Atwood’s skill at revealing the horrors and injustice with a surgeon’s scalpel rather than a blunt mallet. I’ve only ever read her “The Year of the Flood”, which was not entirely enjoyable,  so I had no expectations for Handmaid. I enjoyed the story, but also her style on this novel. As with other works I really liked this year, it felt like it took a moderate premise and elevated it to literature-grade storytelling. Even if the storyline hadn’t been so poignant to the current war on women’s health, this is a strong piece on its own merits.

Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman

As blasphemy as this may be to my general sensibilities about the lingering importance of reading actual books in a digital world, part of me has the sneaking suspicion that the absolute best way to experience Gaiman’s work is through an audiobook in which he is the narrator. Gaiman’s writing is good, at times great, but his greatest strength is as a teller of stories. He has a voice and storytelling ability that seem to transcend whatever literary limitations his writing may have.  I don’t even think of him as an author so much as a storyteller who works a lot in novel form. Norse Mythology is the sum and substance of that fundamental character. Norse mythos in general derive from an oral tradition of character-focused stories. It’s not surprising that they have been a great influence to Gaiman (See: American Gods, etc.), but that his style would be such a great match for retelling these myths. Gaiman doesn’t completely reinterpret the classical Eddas as much as he adds flavor, fleshes out characters, and weaves connections. It doesn’t end up being my favorite of his works, but it was a very enjoyable listen. Like all good storytellers, Gaiman takes a universally shared set of stories, and then tells them through his own voice and imagination.

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Murakami

My appreciation of Murakami continues to grow the more of his works I read (at some point I’ll get around to the long-delayed 1Q84). I still feel like I’m missing some of the subtext and tone that doesn’t transcend the strong Japanese themes of his characters’ worlds. But his ability to meld messy, honest human emotion and relationships with hints of Ishiguro-esque unreliable narration and magical realism make his reads challenging and rewarding. South is another story of star crossed love, but serves mostly as a reflection on our ties to our pasts, and the tangible affects them have on us. The protagonist’s vacillation between the reality of his family and business and the (maybe) ghost of a former love, and the past she represents, is handled exceptionally well. Some authors are masters of subtle cuts, some of devastating reveals. Murakami somehow manages to combine both in an organic, human way. I’m sure there are deeper reflections on post-war Japanese society and transition here that I’m missing, but the story is satisfying enough to keep me from being too concerned.

The Revenant – Michael Punke

Oddly, Punke’s period revenge thriller is unintentionally the third fur trappers/voyageurs related novel I’ve been reading this year (still trying to clear some space to properly enjoy Proulx’s Barkskins). The writing is short of literary, but the story of a fur trapper fighting for survival and revenge after being left for dead in the wake of a grizzly mauling is a page turner. Punke’s writing is just sort of…there, but decent enough not to distract from the pace and telling of the story. I found out afterwards that the story is based to some extent on an actual historical person, which reduced Punke a bit in my estimation, but simultaneously increased my interest in the story. I have not yet seen the movie.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Richard Flanagan

Flanagan is a new author for me, and I’m excited to have become acquainted with his works. Narrow Road is the story of an Australian’s experience as a POW in WWII Japan, and the impact of his notoriety later in life, but includes so many other times and perspectives that it’s hard to really summarize it well. While the WWII POW motif has been over-, and poorly, done as of late in a series of fairly schmaltzy-but-popular works (looking at you, Unbroken), Narrow Road’s focus is far broader and more literary (I know I keep using “literary” as if it was some sort of litmus test of measurable value. I recognize it’s just a subjective thing. When I use it, what I’m trying to get at is a work that focuses as strongly on the crafting of the language and style as it does on the story.) Flanagan’s army surgeon moves through beautiful set pieces in a story that reflects on the infirmity of character, and the discrepancies between the images the world assigns us and our internal realities. It reminded me a lot, without being at all derivative, of Ondaatje’s The English Patient as being a strong character study walking through robustly rendered landscapes of war.

Afterword - Abandoned Books

I try not to abandon books, but as I have gotten older, and the endless afternoons of youth have dwindled to stolen reading moments at night, etc, I have less patience for books I don’t enjoy. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy came highly recommended, but I couldn’t get through it. It felt like a poorly executed memoir that wasn’t particularly relevant to the broader social forces it was touted as “explaining”. I also decided to finally sit down and read a collection of Arthurian Romance, but just couldn’t get through it. I appreciate the style and form and its historical significance, but in the end it was mostly knights getting into random fights with other knights for unapparent reasons and lengthy hyperbole on the knightly character of knightly characters.