Stream of Consciousness

Book Reviews: No Romance Book Group

Here's a sampling of the informal book reviews I’ve posted as part of the No Romance Book Group a few friends and I started back in 2001:

Books

December 2004: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

I just finished reading Gilead, the new novel by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson has only ever written one other novel—Housekeeping— and that was published 23 years ago so this new one has been long-awaited. And it’s good.

Robinson’s style in this novel is different than in Housekeeping. Gilead unfolds slowly, with a somewhat formal 19th century diction as if the writer—and by extension, the reader—has all the time in the world. It’s written as a diary, a journal addressed to a young son from his 77-year old father who is expecting to die any day. She consciously repeats words and ideas, returns to musings that she began several pages back, and uses lots of commas which forces extra attention to be paid to every chosen word. All this, in turn, reveals the depth and clarity and luminescence of the novel’s deeply religious ideas. This novel is very philosophical; it wrestles with big ideas about existence and faith. But it also read like a good story and not just a work concerned with faith and God. It feels very old-fashioned and almost unfashionable in these A.D.D-addled times. Maybe that’s part of why I found it so touching and appealing.

February 2005: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume 1

I read an excerpt from this book by Bob Dylan in Time or Newsweeklast year. It piqued my interest so I put it on hold at the public library and finally got it. I can’t put it down. The style is conversational and funny and weird. I feel like I’m seeing into the mind and soul of a truly interesting, eccentric, unclassifiable human being, one who has always thought his own thoughts and inhabited his own mind. There are only minimal touches of ego. There’s a two-page explanation of how he came to be Bob Dylan from Robert Allen Zimmerman—the guy has more than a touch of the obsessive-compulsive nut!

So far, the only periods in his life that he’s writing about are the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, when he first arrived in New York City and was trying to make it as a folksinger and one section on 1968, when he was living in Woodstock, married with three young kids. Of course, he was there in NYC when things really started jumping in many genres of music. He knew nearly all the folk, hillbilly, country, jazz and blues greats. It is fascinating to get his personal take on what has become almost
historical truth by now. To find out who he admired/emulated/wanted to be; Dave Van Ronk, Woody Guthrie, Roy Orbison and Hank Williams were his early idols. Anyhow, if you have any interest in Bob—his music, his poetry, his longevity in the music field, an original uncompromised mind—this is a fun and fascinating read.

April 2005: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint

On recent LONG flights from Portland Oregon to Tokyo then Bangkok, I finally read Philip Roth’s “classic” Portnoy’s Complaint. Somehow I’d missed it when it was controversial and best selling all those years ago. It is definitely, overall, a guy book. And while some of it seems dated in these 21st years since the sexual liberation/free love era of the 1960s, Roth’s writing and sense of humor remained fresh—a good airplane read even if one’s seatmates look at you with eyebrows raised. After reading, I left my copy behind on a bookshelf in an Internet cafe in Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand. I’m sure some English speaking world traveler has it in his/her hot little hands by now.

More Book Reviews from No Romance

Here's a sampling of my holiday 2005 reading:

1. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

OK, I do generally think that the books that make the NY Times BEST books of the year list are generally worth reading. Not their NOTABLE list which is miles long but the short one -- usually 5 to 10 titles. When I saw this book, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld on the list I was surprised. How could a debut novel about a girl from Indiana who goes to a prestigious New England prep school on a scholarship be of any interest to 50 year old me?

Well, while I won't say that every thing in the book held my cynical middle-aged interest, this novel is surprisingly affecting and good. The 29 (eek) year old author has talent. She has created a 1st person narrator, Lee Fiora, who will reminded me of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and even Garp in The World According To... And that's why the book is good -- the character Lee, her isolation, her outsider status, her self-deprecation, her insights into her emotional and changing adolescent self, her (in the end) shame and wisdom -- that's the stuff that transcended the actual details of setting and the plot. It isn't that reading about wealthy kids with weird first names who play soccer and row crew and gossip in a little school newspaper about who is hooking up with whom and know their futures are secure (Bush twins!) isn't fascinating to me -- just that the world of adolescents can get a bit self-involved and overwrought and that can be boring. But once I got rolling on this, I couldn't put it down.

2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Three weeks ago (before my iBook died and my email with everyone's addresses with it) I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the sudden death of her husband at the same time their only child was in a serious coma in a NYC hospital. As any of you will know if you've heard about this book, it won the National Book Award last week AND since the book was written Didion's 39 year old daughter has DIED. This book is her attempt to make sense of a grief that she refuses to accept for a long, long time. And to understand how/why people react the way they do to sudden death. I'm not doing it justice -- because Didion is such a smart, insightful writer, it's almost like you have to submit to her prose and see what journey it wants to take you on. Her conclusion seems to be that loss and grief and the death and ensuring absence of someone beloved are never emotions and situations we can plan ahead for or prepare for.

3. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

I read Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life, in the car going to and from Vancouver, British Columbia over the 4th of July weekend. I'd seen the movie but finally, all these years later, got around to the book. Much of the book takes place in or near the landscape we were travelling through: northwestern Washington between Seattle and Bellingham, not far from the Canadian border -- I didn't know this when I grabbed the book as I was running out the door.

It is a good one, a damn good one. Hilarious and deeply disturbing and tragic in the vein of something out of an earlier era, like the novels of Charles Dickens. I am always astonished that kids survive
childhood's like the one Wolff had or the one depicted in the Liar's Club by Mary Karr -- let alone become eloquent enough to tell the tale.

There was so much in it for me as someone who raised a son mostly alone. There was also much in the book to show how hard and risky it was for women to be on their own with kids during the 1950s, especially if they weren't educated and didn't have enough money to live. Compromises, particularly settling down with the wrong man, abound for Wolff's mother. Wolff becomes predictably a bit of a scamp juvenile delinquent with the hilarious self-deprecation of a character like Huck Finn. An enjoyable read with much to teach as well.

John Burdett's Bangkok Crime Thrillers

The past two weeks have been reading John Burdett's crime thrillers. The first, Bangkok 8, and then the brand new one, Bangkok Tattoo. They're set in Thailand. The main character is a Buddhist cop named Sonchai Jitplecheep. He's the product of a Viet Nam vet's liasion with a Thai prostitute.

Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life

I read Tobias Wolff's memoir in the car going to and from Vancouver, British Columbia over the weekend. Much of the book takes place in or near the landscape we were travelling through: northwestern Washington between Seattle and Bellingham, not far from the Canadian border. I'd seen the movie but finally, all these years later, got around to the book.

It is a good one, a damn good one.

For now, here's a passage to give you a flavor of the voice of the first person narrator, the young Toby, a.k.a. Jack who has been fooling around with a gun given to him by his mother's boyfriend when no adults are home:

"Though I avoided the apartment, I could not shake the idea that sooner or later I would get the rifle out again. All my images of myself as I wish to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me. This much I understand now. But the man can give no help to the boy, not in this matter, nor in those that follow. The boy moves always out of reach."

Love that Mma Ramotswe! Love Botswana!

Just read, pretty much in the past twelve hours (excluding sleep), the newest in the ladies' detective series by Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies. These are not works of intellectual genius but they are full of smiles and sun and I really enjoy them. Here's something that spoke to me from this latet:

"It was a strange feeling, [Mma Ramotswe] had always thought; feeling the breathing of another, a reminder of how we all share the same air, and how fragile we are. At least there was enough air in the world for everybody to breathe; at least people did not fight with one another over that. And it would be difficult...for the rich people to take all the air away from the poor people, even if they could take so many other things? Black people, white people: same air."

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

I just finished Truth & Beauty: A Friendship last night. I really like Patchett's novels. But this book -- I don't know. It's partly about the friendship and partly about becoming a successful writer. It's basically the story of Patchett's friendship with another writer, the late Lucy Grealy. Lucy was the woman who wrote Autobiography of a Face, a memoir about her struggles with jaw cancer when she was a kid and all the subsequent (32?) surgeries she then had to try to reconstruct missing parts of her jaw and face. Apparently this book was quite the best seller a while back -- did the circuit -- Today, Oprah, etc. I somehow missed it or maybe the subject didn't interest me at the time. Truth to tell, I'm not sure it interests me now after what I learned about this woman in Patchett's book.

Maybe one of the points of the book was how we can love and remain devoted to unlikeable people because they have long been our friends and we share a history. Still, by the end I found myself disliking Lucy Grealy so much I started to question why Ann was such close friends with her. Lucy is a spoiled, manipulative, bratty, self-indulgent human being. I can't believe ALL of her naughty behavior well into adulthood and up until her death at age 39, can be excused by the fact that she has jaw cancer when she was 8. Many of the surgeries she subjected herself to were not only elective but often experimental. Which seemed, at times, to show she had bad decision-making capabilities. Yet every time, after they didn't work out, Lucy would be back on her complaining, self-pitying jags. Oh yeah, she even buys a boob job with one of her student loans which of course she never pays back.

Ann's writing is strong, as always. Her words are interspersed with the actual text of letters Lucy wrote to Ann over the years. These felt a bit unedited and, at times, too intimate. And even some of Ann's writing was a bit too much of the waxing poetic and loving and gushy about their amazingly close friendship. It was almost like they were stuck is some kind of 20 something, sorority girl sisterhood. Where, in spite of the trouble they made for themselves, they overall seemed to get the best literary agent, the best book contracts, the best fellowships and grants to the most prestigious places etc. Maybe I was just jealous of their success as writers? Or the fact that they got to live such self-centered lives and call themselves writers and be constantly focused on their work during the years in my life I was busy raising a child.

In the end, I found Lucy a child of the Reagan you-can-have-it-all 80s. Spend spend spend, mooch off your friends, never suffer most of the consequences until your masochistic, self-indulgent self begins to do you in. The book does remind me that it is possible to make a book these days out of just about anything -- especially if you are already a famous, well-loved author.

Reading List

Here's what I've been reading lately, on this road trip to Idaho, back home, etc. or what I'm about to read:

Buddha by Karen Armstrong.
A well-researched, cleverly imagined reconstruction of the Buddha's life by a former nun turned college professor.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.
Wild tales of growing up white in civil-war torn African countries such as Rhodesia and Zambia with a racist, alcoholic mother and family tragedies that are right up there with the Brontes and the Kennedys.

Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller.
Starting this when I finish Fuller's childhood memor. Her writing is captivating and sharp as a tack. Can't put it down kind of stuff.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The book about the validity and reliability of split-second judgment and decision-making. Not as good as his first book, The Tipping Point, in my view.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
Stories of the allure of four plants -- the apple, tulip, the potato, and marijuana. I liked the chapter about pot and altered states of consciousness the best.

The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Schlain.
This book is hard to read but captivating. Schlain's theory is that whenever literacy and the use of the alphabet and written language is ascendant in a culture, worship of the goddess and placing value on the female, the feminine and women in general diminished or is extinguished. It's smarter than your average feminist tract on similar goddess subjects and a great way to troll through all of human history.

ALSO, scanned and skimmed a hilarious book about modern neuroses. A friend loaned it to me. I decided I used to have Multi-tasking Attention Deficit Disorder and now I have the disorder that causes the pendulum to swing between a life that craves order but then courts chaos.

Other books I bought on this trip in addition to the Alexandra Fuller memoirs:

Dover Thrift editions of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe; Sojourner Truth's autobiography; The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson and essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. At one to two bucks apiece, who can pass them up?

Bertrand Russell's book on western philosophy. Used to own it, must have sold it in one of my bookshelf purging frenzies. This would be instructive to read after the Schlain book.

A complete set of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. I think I only have Justine kicking around at home. Blast from the past/stroll down 30 years of reading memory lane with this one. It will be interesting to see if the writing seems as good as it did when I read these novels at age seventeen.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda.

Last week, I finished reading an astonishingly sad, shocking, disturbing, amazingly well-written and deeply important book by Philip Gourevitch. The book has a long title: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda.

As you might gather from the title, this is the story of the Rwandan genocide throughout the decade of the 1990s, as well as earlier "ethnic cleansing" attempts in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I decided to read this after reading the Samantha Power book because I felt it might help me understand more of how such violence can happen in a society/country.

Included in this book is the story that makes up the plot line of the recent film, Hotel Rwanda. But there is much more and, in spite of the grisly nature of much of the subject matter, this book has somehow made me open my heart and mind to the question of what it means to be a human being in these times in which we live. This book also is a case study of 20th century African history and politics, something I have long been fascinated by but never knew where to begin to study more about it. Gourevitch never loses sight of the dignity of the people whose stories he is telling -- survivors of unimaginable horrors who are now forced to live alongside those who tried to kill them.