Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Could I have found an author too emotionally high strung and overwrought for even my tastes (I enjoy Augusten Burroughs for goodness' sake)? Or maybe it's just that I don't share her conclusions and would have preferred her to dissolve into an sodden heap and remain intellectually consistent. Anyway, she seems like she would be a great person to know and talk to but she seems a little breathless and disingenuous in this book. I kept rolling my eyes at her histrionics while simultaneously enjoying and sympathizing with her (I did feel like I might know her). But it seems like she discovered faith in order to avoid utter nervous collapse, which while expedient, isn't necessarily valid.

Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. I'm taking time away from writing a lab report to post this, but I've let it sit for too many days and I don't want to forget how much I enjoyed this story. I loved the relationships in this book, the shifting dialogues between the people, and how I found myself sympathetic with even the most hostile of them. It explores the complexity and intensity of mother-daughter relationships and their life-long importance no matter how estranged and distant they become. The character of Christine was amazing - the sort of person I usually unthinkingly despise or discount as trivial and stupid - and she became so compelling and far more self-aware and loving than I would have guessed. It's wonderful when the people in a book surprise you.

Goodbye Kilgore Trout

so it goes.

Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck

Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck. Somehow, I don't really love novels that focus on cultural differences or exchanges - especially between Japan and America - they seem trivial and a little clumsy, somehow, like people trying to get to know each other who aren't quite fluent in the other's language and stick to things like food and climate. But I couldn't help but like Toshi and his family and the parts dealing with his childhood were lovely. I can't catch precisely what bothered me, but his reactions to the stereotypically nutso Jane didn't really fit, for example. When I got past the first hundred pages or so and had ceased to be annoyed I liked it better because I was attached to the people. So, ok, I thought it was charming, but it didn't convince me.

LibriVox

I recently discovered this incredible site,LibriVox, that has tons of free audiobooks from public-domain works read by volunteers. You can download them as mp3s. We love listening to audio books on car trips, and have been driving up to Flagstaff a lot. Last week I'd listened to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (one of my dad's audiobooks - NOT free) in the car on the trip, and even Matthew enjoyed it, so I went on a hunt for more audiobooks. We downloaded Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, and Alice in Wonderland. So far the readers have been great - even doing all the pirate voices and everything! Much better than the BBC reading of The Hobbit. I have big plans to introduce my family to Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and P.G. Wodehouse - we just need a few dozen more road trips. The cds save me from getting carsick from reading on those mountain roads.

Thomas Mallon, Henry and Clara.

Thomas Mallon, Henry and Clara. I don't know why I keep stumbling into historical fiction; it's a genre I don't usually pursue. But this disquieting novel was one of those whose setting doesn't seem to inhibit the story and the historical characters seem to be themselves and not figures brought in from outside. It's the story of the unhappy couple who were attending the theatre with the Lincolns on the evening of the assassination. Mallon writes beautifully and his story, a tragic melodrama, is somehow nostalgic beyond the subject matter. Clara could be transported into a Henry James novel without any rearrangement.

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. The first Rumpole story I've read. I'm a new fan of the series. I'm glad to have chanced on it; it's funny and light, the perfect thing to read with coffee and toast or in the bathtub - like the Nero Wolfe series. And all day I've been visualizing my husband someday referring to me as "She Who Must Be Obeyed" in his memoirs.

Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat

Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat. I wanted to give my brain a rest and read something cozy. Not nearly as good (not even in the same category) as the Prydain stories, but cute.

Roddy Doyle, The Van

Roddy Doyle, The Van. I loved this book - it was absolutely hilarious. Two laid-off irishmen start up a "chipper van" - fast food on wheels. It was actualy a sweet story, even filled with rancid grease and profanity.

Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars

Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars. I just wrote a horrendous paper on this book, so I'll be brief. It's an unfocused recounting of life in New York's Lower East side for Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrant women. Bogged down by jargon and random contradictory assertions, above all a DULL and rambling book in the author's voice - it was saved by the voices of the women themselves. Whenever the author quoted from extensive audio interviews (from the CUNY oral history project) the book suddenly became vibrant.

Carol Shield, The Stone Diaries

Carol Shield, The Stone Diaries. The intricate story of Daisy Stone Goodwill's life. She's orphaned, emigrates from Canada to Indiana, is married twice, raises children, writes, travels, gardens, and dies in old age. She remains an evasive and enigmatic figure to her family, who see her as they see themselves. Shields highlights the inaccuracy of memory, the incompleteness of stories, the fundamental mystery of other people - how we can never really know another person, how there are always mysteries and ambiguities, how often we deliberately misinterpret and pigeonhole for the sake of simplicity. Biography, even a fictional representation of a biography is necessarily incomplete. I enjoyed the early part of the book about Daisy's parents and early life, which was beautiful and direct.

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan. I thought it was named after the Bob Dylan song - I had no idea it would feature actual orphans with guns. A bloody, grotesquely violent story about a bunch of old geezers living around a swampy lake, heading variously toward death. Full of gore, fancy cars, whores, nudity, even sex, without a moment of sexiness or joy. No sympathetic characters, no redeeming qualities in anyone, just rotting decay leading to moldy death. The book was full of beautiful, evocative sentences, but I didn't feel it cohered into a whole that said anything as ambitious as the epic Hannah was aiming for.

Brian Moore, The Statement

Brian Moore, The Statement. A chase-story in Southern France. Pierre Brossard, a convicted war criminal sheltered by the Catholic Church, police, and government officials, has lived for over forty years hiding in plain sight. Now a new set of gendarmes are looking for him in earnest, the church is under scrutiny and investigation, and a mysterious vigilante group is trying to bring him to justice by assassination. Fun. Different people are following his trail, and we also see events unfold from the hunted point of view. A weakness or two in the plot (Brossard was too smart not to have deduced who was betraying his movements, for one), but engaging and perfectly paced. A little complexity was introduced with the religious conversion of Brossard, but on the whole he was too revolting to feel even a twinge of sympathy for.

Martin Amis, Night Train

Martin Amis, Night Train. Well. I feel like I was bludgeoned in the back of the head, finishing that - one of those nasty, brutish and short novels. A stylized hard-boiled police narrative sort of book, but written by a British literary AUTHOR consciously trying to get the essence of the form down. The narrator was a tough ex-alcoholic female detective writing in Ed McBain dialect: there was a little too much Latin sprinkled around to be quite convincing, but he definitely got the world-weary cynicism down. The ending was purposefully unsatisfying and discouraging. I felt a little bewildered through the book, because I think I had Martin Amis mixed up with his father, Kingsley Amis (oops - he's the guy who wrote Lucky Jim), and was expecting a different kind of book, funny at least, which is why I wasn't ready for all the blood and cigarettes. But the man can write; he can't turn it off even when he tries.

The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001)

The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001), ed. by Gardner Dozois. This was my Christmas break binge reading. Anything that boasts "more than 250,00 words" on the cover isn't exactly highbrow, but it was a blast. I was talking with my mom about how the short story is the perfect vehicle for certain genres (chief among them SF and hard-boiled mysteries). Most speculative fiction authors don't excel at character development, at least it's not their focus nor ours when we pick up their work. The reason we read their stuff is the ideas, the fantasy, and the fabulous brain twisting, which are perfectly displayed in a short story which doesn't drag you along with some bland action-hero for hundreds of pages. Anyway, lots of good stories. I really enjoyed a story by Brenda W. Clough, May Be Some Time, about a revived member of the Terra Nova antarctic expedition - it dreamily combined the elements of an adventure story, comedic British imperialism, and time-travel. Part of my delight in science fiction short stories might be nostalgia - I remember reading old Asimov's Science Fiction magazines at my grandparents' Beulah Beach cottage (where lights-out was laxly enforced) late into the night and feeling deliciously sinful.

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time. At the very end of this memoir (in the last ten pages), I got the distinct feeling I had read this book before. I couldn't remember any details, so perhaps it was just literary déjà-vu. Anyway, I didn't really like Frank in the book; but I saw myself in him, especially his escapism and unwarranted self-superiority. The book's a little Salinger-esque, very east-coasty, full of angst, exactly what you'd think an author's childhood memoir would be like. I liked it, but I disagreed with the blurb on the back cover in which William Styron praised "its almost total lack of self-pity"; I thought there was much calculatingly understated self-pity through every chapter. One thing that I liked was that it was such a solitary memoir, very much about being a lonely child, growing into a lonely young adult.

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion. A beautiful compact small fairy tale. It has historical figures, but it's not historical fiction. A cook for Napolean and a Venetian pickpocket/courtesan/gondolier tell their stories. Elements of magic realism? Maybe surrealism? Not even really a romantic novel, despite the name and the cover; it's alternately creepy and precociously lovely. The narrators contemplate passion, disguise, truth, present, past, death, the nature of time... I'm not describing this well at all; I think it's the tension between gambling everything and choosing not to play that's the central conflict. Unclassifiable.

Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen. A strange and lovely book. Maybe a little too luminous; such beautiful language, but at times it seemed overwrought, too delicate and elaborate. Opal and Ray (the names are not an accident in a book whose principle obsession is light) are the two quietly elusive people whose romance and lives the main story arc follows. Ray Foster's scientific (or phenomenological) passions didn't really convince me, but the scientific optimism of the early part of the last century did; overall the place and times came through more strongly than the people - it's hard to have two such non-verbal people as your focus, I think. That may be why last portion of the book, dealing with the son Ray Jr (or lightfoot - see what I mean about the light vocabulary?) was a simpler story - more direct, maybe a little stock, but lightfoot and Flash (again!) were so much more transparent or accessible. Or less opaque? I'm being infected by the language of light... But a beautiful phosphorescent story.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost. This was a total riot - I actually had to hide it for a week so I'd study. It's four separate narrations of the same events, with, of course, each teller reaching different conclusions and in their own ways unreliable. But it's not one of those annoying post-modern non-mystery novels that you are supposed to make your own conclusions on and are frustratingly inconclusive; it's an old fashioned mystery that ties up quite nicely at the end. Set in Restoration England, and with a few Natural Philosophers as characters spouting great debate and experimenting away, it might remind you of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, although it reminded me more of the historical thriller The Name of the Rose (by Umberto Eco), or maybe Possession: A Romance (by A. S. Byatt). A nice fat book, the kind of book you wish was longer, not shorter, with tons of detail about Oxford in 1663 - even some experiments in Robert Boyle's elaboratory as well as boundless political intrigue. Of course, I wished there was more of the deciphering and experiments, but we do have the above mentioned trilogy for that. The story has an odd heretical conclusion that is really pretty interesting; I also might have liked even more on the religious sects. I suppose that's the advantage of using in-character narration, you're limited on how many discursive asides you can make without breaking role, or the temptation would definitely be to show off the research and you'd end up with several thousand pages instead of merely 685.

Atul Gawande, Complications

Atul Gawande, Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science. Another book for class, but I greatly enjoyed it. It's very straightforward, almost simplistic in delivery, but truly thoughtful and interesting. Good thought on medical decision making, mistakes, complications, balance between judgement and science, and the limits of knowledge. The perspective of a surgical resident is unique. The pieces on surgery and diagnosis were frightening and reassuring at the same time. Gawande's most original thinking was his honest analysis of medical training and the evasion that surrounds it. 1) training leads to mistakes, 2) training and practice are necessary to make good doctors, 3) The choices about who is practiced upon are partly chance, but mostly the disadvantaged are used for practice.

It's a hard book to categorize - it's similar to Oliver Sacks's, in that it's a series of case studies expanded and digressed upon, but without the intellectual and literary pretension (also perhaps not quite as nice to read; sacks writes like a novelist). It's better than most medically oriented nonfiction - more humble and chatty - think Stephen Jay Gould rather than the new england journal of medicine.