blackdogbooks - the dawg pound

A new year and a new thread to keep track of the reading - I think you guys all understand the system of bones I use to rate books, because this is my eighth year with the group. I saw many familiar names on the threads, though a lot of you may not be familiar with me as I keep a rather more quiet presence here than I used to. I'm using the time I don't spend looking at all the threads here to read, but also write. I've begun submitting some short fiction to literary publications and have been writing a lot more.

I'm going to go back to keeping a comprehensive list of the books I've read, or attempted, throughout the year in this first post.

Welcome to the Dawg Pound.

1. Revival by Stephen King
2. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
3. Introverts in the Church by Adam McHugh
4. Who's Irish? by Gish Jen
5. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
6. The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon
7. The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy
8. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
9. Identical by Scott Turow
10. Good Benito by Alan Lightman
11. Dies the Fire by S.M.Stirling
12. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
13. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
14. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays by T.S. Eliot
16. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
17. The World According to Garp by John Irving
18. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
19. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
20. My Antonia by Willa Cather
21. Beloved by Toni Morrison
22. Lightning People by Christopher Bollen
23. Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
24. First Blood by David Morrell
25. The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
26. Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute
27. Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
28. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
29. Finders Keepers by Stephen King
30. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
31. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
32. Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor
33. Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint
34. Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
35. Killing Floor by Lee Child
36. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

Good to see you here, Mac! Happy reading - and writing - this year!

Welcome back, Mac!

Thanks, Scaifea, roni, and doc!

Hi there

Hey beeg - great to hear from you!

I like reading your reviews and look forward to books read in 2015!

And torontoc is back, too! Welcome.

How did I lose track of you last year? Well, welcome back!

Don't now scvlad, but I'm here now and so are you.

Mac, you have a real gift for writing as evidenced by your well thought-out reviews. Let us know when you become a published author!

Thanks, Donna

Oh, ditto what Donna said up there! I love reading your reviews!

Happy New Year Mac. It is so good to see you here!

You guys are all too nice and I'm glad to see you here.

Happy New Year! What a lovely pup you have! And, I'm impressed that there's some space on those shelves - how do you do that?!? Is it a magic trick? ;)

Thanks, Laura. You new to my thread. Sadly, we had to put her down on Memorial Day last year. But she is the black dog and will ever be.

That little corner of the shelves is one small space where there is room. It's a battle to keep room on the shelves.

I lost track of you last year and I'm glad to have found you early this year!

Welcome back, cal. Good to see you here. Anyone who loses me, feel free to message my profile page and I'll send a link. I don't post or respond as much here as I used to, so my thread gets lost in the activity if the group pretty quickly.

Well, I've also got you on the Threadbook wiki page.

Happy New Year Mac!

Mac, I'm so sorry for your loss. I know what that feels like -- a kick in the stomach. We lost our beloved sheltie Simon a few years ago, and I still grieve periodically.

All the best to you.

Thanks, doc. Didn't know that.

Hibernate, another new name. Love the bear!

Thanks, whisper.

Book #1 Revival by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

“But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.” So says Stephen King, through the voice of Jaime Morton in Revival. Jaime meets the Reverend Charles Jacobs when he is just a boy, but the two’s lives are conjoined from that day forward, through the death of Jacobs’ wife and son, through the addicted years of Jaime’s adult life, and up through Jacobs’ final breath. Jacobs melts down after his family dies, raging from the pulpit in the loss of his faith. Years later, Jaime stumbles into a carny show where Jacobs is using a mysteriously charged power to create fanciful portraits for the rubes that pay. He also uses the power to cure Jaime’s heroin addiction. Eventually, Jacobs’ experimentation with electricity provides him a window into another dimension, where he hopes to learn the otherworldly fate of wife and son. But there is something waiting on the other side for him, and for Jaime.

Two hallmarks of King’s stories make this a difficult read to put down. The first will be hard to believe for the readers familiar with King in the abstract – an examination of the spirit and faith. King’s body of work is replete with musings on God, his place in our world, and human faith. Through Jaime and Jacobs, King discusses the nature of God – whether He exists, His nature, and whether the faith humans place in Him is misguided. In this book, King puts God on trial through the eyes of those who’ve lost their faith in Him as a result of tragedy. Like Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, mortality and the fragility of life are heavy on his mind. And the ultimate question, the one that Jacobs is Frankensteinly obsessed with, is: What awaits us after we’ve shaken off the trappings of this world? It’s a dark journey.

The second thing that makes this a classic King novel is the delicate nostalgic touch he uses to tell the story through Jaime’s voice. Jaime is essentially journaling his experience for clarity. But the effect is to walk readers through a time that has passed on. It is just within reach for many of us, but Jaime brings that world alive in his account. And the process is cathartic for Jaime, but also for the reader. Writing doesn’t just quicken the memory, it focuses internal understanding – it’s the reason that we seek out stories and strive to tell them.

Bottom Line: A tale of obsession and tragedy of which Mary Shelley would approve, examining the loss of faith.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year already!

>18 blackdogbooks: Oh, I'm so sorry! The only downside to having pets is that they leave us too soon.

Excellent review of Revival! Maybehaps I'll pick that up very soon!

Thanks, Laura.

Nice review! If Revival wasn't already on my wishlist I would now add it.

Thanks, cal.

Mac, I'm waiting for my name to roll to the top of the library hold list for Revival and now I am looking forward to reading it even more.

Sarge, good to see you here.

Thanks, I'm trying to spend a little more time on LT this year.

Book #2 Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

My Review on the book's home page:

Six years ago, I read Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale. When I undertook the reading, I knew how people characterized the story about Offred, a reprogrammed and enslaved surrogate; and I knew how people often characterized Atwood herself, in light of the book. Reviews and criticisms, whether scholarly or casual, are replete with gender politics. But reading The Handmaid’s Tale, I was struck by Atwood’s examination of individual power struggles, both male and female, much more so than any power struggle between the sexes. Though the narrator and central character in the story is a female, the societal structure that Atwood erects highlights the enslavement of males and females to serve the ruling class. Atwood rather directs her keen eye at interpersonal power struggles, exposing the compromise necessary for survival and the resulting losses to the deeply held sense of identity. The review I wrote after finishing the book focused on a less feministic approach to understanding the story. The comments I received suggested that I’d missed the boat.

I wonder how many of the people who wrote comments about my misunderstanding have ever read the book that Atwood next published after The Handmaid’s Tale – Cat’s Eye. Like any book, if you go in expecting to support your expectations, you’ll find the evidence you seek. I suspect that many with a certain political slant with regard to gender are drawn to Atwood and The Handmaid’s Tale. But a deeper examination of that book along with Cat’s Eye undercut the notion that Atwood was writing from a particularly feminist slant.

With Cat’s Eye, Atwood takes up the story of Elaine, a Canadian painter about to celebrate a retrospective about her work in a Toronto gallery. As the show approaches, Elaine reflects on her young life and the events that shaped her. The book is structured so that events in real time trigger memories for Elaine, carrying her back almost corporeally. She recounts the nomadic childhood at the hands of her entomologist father, her formative adolescence struggles to fit in, and the relationships she stumbles into as a young woman. One of the most cutting pieces of the story concerns Elaine’s dabbling in a feminist group when she begins her artistic career, and the later characterization of her paintings as feminist. Elaine reflects on set of paintings that features her mother first in an apron and then in slacks and a man’s jacket, the effect of which makes her seem as though she is vanishing and reappearing in a different, more masculine form. Elaine laments its reception as being a representation of the “Earth Goddess” or as a comment on female slavery or stereotyping. Really, the character explains, it’s about her mother’s personal dislike of housework. If you listen carefully, you can hear Atwood chastising a certain reading of The Handmaid’s Tale.

After Elaine marries and has a child, things turn sour in the relationship. In a bid to establish some human connection, Elaine begins meeting with a local feminist group. Remembering the occasions, she realizes that she was uncomfortable, out of place. The theme is carried through to an interview before the retrospective when the reporter calls her a ‘feminist painter.’ Elaine responds, “I hate party lines. … I like that women like my work. Why shouldn’t I? … Not everyone likes my work. It’s not because I’m a woman. If they don’t like a man’s work, it’s not because he’s a man. They just don’t like it.” Can you hear Atwood preaching? There may be some empowering affect from the reading of Atwood’s stories for women, but it’s more complicated than relying simply on gender politics – it’s rooted more in identity: what forms it, what influences it, whether it is palatable or needs changing, and what sacrifice is required to maintain it. This is what Elaine is reminisces about throughout her story; and what Atwood seems more interested in during the phase of her life that produced The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye.

Bottom Line: A book much more about identity than about gender politics, similar to The Handmaid’s Tale before it.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

That's a great review of Cat's Eye, Mac, it gets a thumbs up from me. I didn't realize it had been published after The Handmaid's Tale, which is one of my all-time favourite books which I've read three times so far. I've been meaning to get to Cat's Eye for decades now, and certainly all of last year when I put it in a book pile next to my bed where I hoped I would be encouraged to pick it up sooner than later, but other books took it's place all the same. I can definitely see your point about how those two books weren't necessarily putting forth a feminist point of view. I've only read a handful of her books, but from what I understand of MA's work, she originally went from a very feministic point of view and progressively shifted away from those concerns as she realized the feminist agenda was too restrictive for her liking. Now I don't think one can really pick out much of that influence in her writing anymore, save for the fact that her female characters are strong and independent, but then, so are many female characters in many books in this post-feminist age.

In any case, I was dropping by to say hello, and also to tell you I'm nearly finished with Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell, which I originally picked up based on your recommendation. I've really been enjoying it and it's been fascinating having Thomas De Quincy as a fictional character, though my only regret it that I didn't pick up Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings before this book so I'd have a better understanding of his writings, though of course this isn't necessary to appreciate Morrell's novel. I really love historical fiction and this is hitting all the right spots, though I do admit the first scene in which The Artist is committing a very violent and gory group murder is so shocking I wondered whether I wanted to continue with the book and whether I would be able to stomach it... but I'm glad I stuck to it, so thanks for the suggestion!

Very pleased to see you here, smiler. And thanks for the thumb. Cat's Eye is right up your alley, I think. And I'm really happy you stuck to the Morrell; he's publishing a follow up to that one, picking up where it left off.

I really need to read Cat's Eye. It looks terrific. Thanks for the review, Mac!

Book #4 Who’s Irish by Gish Jen

My Review on the book's home page:

Gish Jen is an uncommon writer, conversant in multiple cultures and identities. The wit she sprinkles into her stories can produce a smile and a laugh, just before it quickens deeper emotions. Who’s Irish?, a collection of short fiction, strips the layers off of what it means to be Chinese and American and both at the same time.

Among the most memorable stories in the collection is the title story, originally published in The New Yorker in 1998. Jen’s tale of a Chinese grandmother maneuvering the landmines of modern American child rearing is simple and fresh, given The New Yorker’s typical voice and subject matter for short fiction. There’s no sex obsessed tales of betrayal or post-modern alcohol stained ennui. The Chinese grandmother in the story is trying to care her granddaughter, the wild child of her daughter and her lazy, Irish son-in-law. Her daughter’s permissive nature has gone to seed, both in the case of the husband and the child. The strong wills of the grandmother and the child collide in a disaster. When the dust settles, grandmother is welcome only in the home of her Irish in-laws. The story is a biting examination of how two different traditional cultures have assimilated into an American landscape; on what remains and what doesn’t; on the lack of substance and the lack of any deep connection to history in the resulting identities.

Similarly, in the final and longest story in the collection, ‘House, House, Home,’ Pammie, a college girl from a traditional, first-generation Chinese family falls into a relationship with her college art professor. They marry and have children. Her family disapproves and ostracizes her because she married a white man or because she married a self-important oaf or because she married someone whose chosen profession is so esoteric – he doesn’t even produce art, he just thinks about it and talks about it. Whatever the reason, Pammie begins to indulge in her own artistic notion, and her husband leaves her. In picking up the pieces of her life, she reconnects with her family and her own identity.

Jen returns to this topic in her stories often, identifying the funny ironies of remaking yourself in a new culture. Along the way, she redefines what it means to be American. While the stories in Who’s Irish? are a little uneven, all of them are marked with her sharp tongue and keen eye, such that the whole is an evocative experience.

Bottom Line: A slightly uneven collection of stories that examine the meandering concept of cultural identity in the context of modern American life.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #5 Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

My Review on the book's home page:

Await Your Reply is one of those books that enchants the reading world and climbs the best-seller list, but probably shouldn’t. Reader reviews describe it a clever and surprising and suspenseful. Unfortunately, Chaon’s effort in the story seems more focused on being clever and maintaining the suspense for that inevitable surprise than he does on telling a story.

Few readers should be taken in by Chaon’s set up for the book – three apparently unconnected people in unusual situations – as the book’s own marketing telegraphs that their lives will be connected when it’s all finished. Ryan is in a car, driven by a mysterious unknown person, bound for a hospital where he hopes to have his hand reattached to his arm. The arm is in a bucket of ice on the seat as Ryan fades in and out of consciousness. Lucy arrives at an abandoned motel in Nebraska her high school history teacher, having left home in the middle of the night to avoid scandal. The motel sits next to a dry lake bed and sports a lighthouse from the days when the water lapped at the sands. And Miles examines a map of the Arctic Circle after driving thousands of miles to find his mentally unstable and conspiratorially minded brother. In the last pages of the story, they converge around a single person who has appeared in each of their lives, though he’s appeared in disguise.

There are a few moments when Chaon dips below the surface to look more seriously at one of the characters in the story. But for the most part, he is driven by the plot devices he is using to both keep the secret and set up its revelation. The funny thing is, this edition of the book comes with an author interview where Chaon says, “For me, prose and characters come first. Not because I’m an artiste or something, but because that’s the way I discover the world of the story. I wish I could think about plot more deliberately, but I just find that I can’t.” It’s an amazing statement to have written a book so carefully plotted, and then deny that plot ever even came to mind. Chaon is not a bad writer or a bad story teller, but he has been bewitched, like so many other writers chasing publication, with providing a thrill, a clever twist. There’s nothing wrong with a thrill or a twist, but they shouldn’t be the goal.

Bottom Line: A plot driven book, enamored more with the devices that drive the plot than story-telling.

2 bones!!!!!

Book #7 The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy

My Review on the book's home page:

Pat Conroy’s prose is more akin to poetry – Whitman is a better comparison for the metaphor and descriptive language. Reading Conroy carries you away on a sleepy current, rocking back and forth, lethargic from the sun and the damp air. But there is a rip-tide of violence and anger coursing just underneath the cool surface.

Daufuskie Island – Yamacraw Island in the book – is a place out of time, lying across an expanse of ocean from the South Carolina shore. Once world renowned oysters were dug from the muddy silt, but pollution from a Savannah plant closed the industry in the 1950s. Electricity was extended to the island in the 1950s and telephones in the 1970s. But the residents, largely Gullah, descendants of enslaved Africans, have been slow to change. Conrack, as Conroy is called by the island people in the book, accepts a position teaching at the school there when he is not accepted into the Peace Corps. He finds children who can’t recite the alphabet or spell their own names, who don’t know what country they live in. Conroy uses unusual methods, exposing the students to music and art, teaching through discussion, expanding from things that are familiar to them on the island. The local school board, from across the water, tries to reign in the upstart teacher, first refusing to pay for gasoline to run the boat he uses to cross over to the island and then firing him altogether. The angry young man learns a great deal about himself and the ways of the world in the ensuing battle with the school board.

The Water is Wide is an endearing book. It is marked with Conroy’s hallmark prose in its rougher form, as this was an early book, originally published in 1972. There is a healthy scrutiny of racial politics, another common element of Conroy’s work. But the story is more rooted in Conroy’s attempt to expand the lives of the island people through education. They see him less as a white man than as an oddity from a faraway place, and themselves less as black than as of the soil and water of the island.

Bottom Line:

4 bones!!!!!

Book #6 The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon

My Review on the book's home page:

The world of publication and literature is a fickle thing. One writer manages to strike the fancy of readers or critics, or both, if lucky, while another writer in the same genre or locale avoids notice almost altogether. There is often little rhyme or reason to the phenomenon of who makes it into the larger consciousness of literature. The story of Rick Collignon is such a phenomenon.

Collignon’s first novel, The Journal of Antonio Montoya was published by MacMurray and Beck, a small independent publisher known for introducing new authors, in 1996, and then picked up by Avon Books in 1997. The book is now in reprint with Unbridled Books, along with three of his other novels. Antonio Montoya received very positive reviews, including one from the New York Times Book Review that said it was “a one-sitting read, a novel that captivates and surprises all the way to its chilling end.” But Collignon remains largely unknown in the book world – only about 140 copies of his four books are owned by Librarything readers. What’s worse? He’s also almost completely unknown in his home state of New Mexico, running a roofing and contracting business to pay the bills because he can’t make a living at writing. Outside of marketing blurbs for the book from Tony Hillerman and John Nichols, it doesn’t appear that anyone else in New Mexico is paying attention.

By the time Antonio Montoya was published, Rudolfo Anaya had had about 20 years to be christened the godfather of Chicano and New Mexican literature. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, a story in the tradition of magical realism like Collignon’s novel, is now a part of high school English and Chicano literature courses, and is one of the blessed few titles to be part of the national literacy movement, The Big Read. Hillerman, with his Navajo mysteries, and Nichols, with The Milagro Beanfield, have cornered much of the rest of the local market. One, if not all, are recognizable to almost every New Mexican reader, and to a large portion of the rest of the reading world. Each have garnered numerous local and national honors for their craft. But Collignon toils away in the early morning hours at his writing and on roofs the rest of the day in obscurity.

Anaya is an easy study – a Chicano man who writes about the Chicano culture, his books were initially picked up first by an independent press and then more nationally in the wake of the Chicano rights movement. Hillerman’s popularity is most likely an outgrowth of his genre, the mystery, and the rose-colored glasses with which he describes his Native American characters. Nichols is probably the closest comparison to Collignon, a white man writing about the unique blend of Hispanic and Native cultures in the Northern reaches of New Mexico. The mixture of religion and spiritualism in the fiercely insular, tightly-knit communities against a backdrop of smoky pine and juniper provides a rich storytelling environment. He is the least well-known, and probably wouldn’t be known at all if not for the fact the Robert Redford dug Milagro and made a movie from it. Is it because Collignon is a white man writing about people of color that he hasn’t gained any traction? If his name were Ricardo Chavez, would there be a spark of interest? Hillerman managed to avoid that trap, but he stands his Native cultures up on pedestals, the survivors of persecution and keepers of strange, otherworldly knowledge that’s lost on their harassers. Collignon’s stories are a more straightforward account of life in a small, Hispanic community, told from the perspective of the people in the community. Even Nichols uses some outsiders to tell his stories.

The Journal of Antonio Montoya recounts the death of Jose Montoya’s parents when they hit a cow in the road. At the rainy funeral, as everyone has filtered out, Jose’s mother sits up in her coffin and speaks to her sister-in-law, Ramona Montoya, asking the woman to take charge of Jose. When Ramona gets home, she is greeted at the door by her long dead mother and father, who’ve taken up residence in the home where they once lived and where Ramona now lives. Ramona, an artist, struggles with her craft, trying to capture the life of the place in the landscape and the people, failing more than she succeeds. After an outing with his ghostly grandfather to tend the irrigation ditches, Jose brings home an old, moldy book. The book is The Journal of Antonio Montoya, Ramona’s ancestor, a long forgotten cousin. Antonio chronicled the life of the village and carved religious statues for the church and other residents. As Ramona talks with her lost parents and reads Antonio’s journal, she finds a new connection to her heritage. It is a connection that completes her soul, one that will help her raise the next generation of her family in Jose.

Collignon’s prose is simple but evocative, echoing the power of the high-desert where he lives and where the story is set. His characters are lush and complicated, rich in their Hispanic culture. The pinon and juniper pollen jump off the page, combining with the chili slowly cooking in Ramona’s kitchen, the coppery smell of the late-summer rain, and the dusty odor of the water coming down the dirt irrigation ditches. Collignon is a master of his environment. But he’s also a master of the people who live there, a testament to the relationship he’s developed with the community where he resides, even if he is an outsider.

It’s a shame that more people don’t recognize Collignon; that his name isn’t included in the list of great New Mexican authors with Anaya, Hillerman, and Nichols.

Bottom Line: A book and an author that more people should know about.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year.

PS – If you like this one, try another relatively unknown New Mexican author and book – Cottonwood Saints by Gene Guerin.

40> Great review, dawg! I liked how you placed him in context w/other more recognized (and read) New Mexico writers. I gave The Journal of Antonio Montoya five stars as well. Hopefully your review will spur on many readers to take a chance with this undeservedly neglected writer, Rick Collignon.

Look at you over here! Thanks, Freek.

Book #8 Never Let Me Go by Rick Kazuo Ishiguro

My Review on the book's home page:

Diversity is difficult to achieve in the world of literature. The concept has become more of a watchword for racial or gender politics, a watchword of the modern generations to allow for a more plural set of narratives than were thought available in print. But as publishers seek the minority voices to fill all of the newly diverse niche publication markets, so many writers are able to do little more than churn the same voice, the same tone, the same characters and perspectives out in book after book. Not so, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Never Let Me Go is the sixth, and most recent, novel from this chameleon of literature, though it was published nearly ten years ago. Set in the 1980s and 1990s, it is at once dystopian and British boarding school coming of age. Ishiguro imagines an alternative historical track from the end of World War II in which the ability to clone humans has provided an endless supply of tissue and organ materials. The clones in the story are raised in a school system as they await the proper maturation for the use of their organs. Though there is a vague notion of their fate, the clones are sheltered to the point of an almost unbelievable naiveté, a situation which is complicated upon their release into the world as they await harvesting.

Told in first person, the novel reads like a conversation with the narrator, Kathy, who is a carer – a sort of companion for clones who have begun being taken apart, organ by organ. Ishiguro managed to strike the perfect conversational balance, allowing Kathy to slide back and forth in time and substance as she tells her story, as most of us would if we were chatting about our youth.

The novel is a wonder for anyone who’s read any of Ishiguro’s other work. For example, When We Were Orphans is set in pre-World War II Shanghai, and is a mystery novel. The Remains of the Day, largely considered to be his best work, is a story of manners and repressed emotion, set among the British servant class.

The only criticism to be lodged is Ishiguro’s expository dump in the late pages of the novel to explain the history that the over-protected clones could barely even imagine asking questions about – a problem for someone writing a first person narrative. These clones would never be in a position to know, and therefore discuss, how they came to be where they are and what’s happening to them. Ishiguro lays all of this on the reader through a conversation with one of the clone’s keepers near the ending of the book. Personally, I would have been okay with the veiled references and ambiguous information from the clone’s perspective, as the story doesn’t change much with the in-your-face description.

Bottom Line: A unique story from an extremely diverse author, even if he yearned to disclose too much with the ending.

4 bones!!!!!

Never Let Me Go is on my TBR this year, good to know you liked it (albeit with some qualifications).

Revival seems to be a strong contender to be one of my 7 this Halloween (a reading tradition I borrowed from you) - there is always a King in my list.

I'm glad I inspired the tradition, and with a King always.

>40 blackdogbooks: Interesting review, I will have a look for the book as i am pretty sure I've never read a book set in New Mexico!

Thanks, C. It may be hard to find a copy but I hope you can.

Book #9 Identical by Scott Turow

My Review on the book's home page:

The title of Scott Turow’s latest, Identical, leaves a lot of material for catchy leads and headlines in the reviews; sadly, the rest of the book is exposed for just that treatment.

Decades ago, Presumed Innocent grabbed the entire reading populace by the throat, tightening the grip with each frantic page. Nothing that followed, managed the same level of frenzy, even though he’s turned out some solid stories – for example, The Laws of Our Fathers. For Turow, mysteries are the perfect springboard for examining human foible. His characters are beautiful messes of eccentricity and internal struggle, the kind of stuff makes for realistic, believable fiction. In the end, the resolution of the mystery is not the point. The resonance of his books is in the ongoing struggle for these people in whom we’ve become invested as they try to sort out their lives in the wake of the resolution. In them, we see ourselves, surmounting one struggle only to find the next.

Identical tracks new developments in a long-solved murder just as the convicted killer is released from prison. The killer is Cass, an identical twin of Paul. Paul, a politician on the cusp of emerging to new levels of power, is accused of involvement in Dita Kronos’ murder, even though his twin pleaded guilty to the crime decades before. Dita was Cass’ girlfriend when she was killed, and they represented a new generation from two families that had fallen out over a deeply held secret. It’s all ripped straight from Greek myth – indeed, most of the characters in the book are Greek.

Turrow still produced a readable, if a little predictable, book with Identical. The mystery itself is not very compelling, and can be guessed along the way. But some of the supporting characters are vintage Turow. The new allegations are investigated by two retired investigators, one an FBI agent, Evon, and one a city homicide detective, Tim. Evon is in the midst of an explosively crumbling lesbian relationship. Her FBI career was built on undercover work putting away corrupt judges. She is the consummate outsider. Tim is a lonely, Shakespeare reading widower. They couldn’t be a more mismatched pair, but their work together, and their personal interaction, is some of the most compelling reading that Turow has ever put together – on the same level as Rusty Sabitch and his wife, Barbara, from Presumed Innocent.

Bottom Line: On the whole, Identical is an uneven read, with moments of Turow’s typical keen eye toward on human foible breaking through an otherwise pedestrian and uninspired story.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #10 Good Benito by Alan Lightman

My Review on the book's home page:

Alan Lightman is a revelation – a physics professor at MIT, he also produces lean, beautiful books with depths that are hard to fathom. Good Benito is the second of his books. His debut, Einstein’s Dreams, is a terribly hard act to follow. That book imagined the nighttime wonderings of the master of time, each dream eliciting a different aspect of his notions about the concept, with each a comment not just on the nature of time, but also on the nature of life and choice. Time, as described by Lightman through Einstein’s Dreams, cannot be completely contained in the mathematical, must be viewed through a lens of humanity to be fully understood.
Elegiac and spare, Alan Lightman’s Good Benito follows that same examination, focusing on the life of one man, Bennett Lang. A physics student, and later professor, like Lightman himself, Bennett’s story is introduced as he takes a commission from a dean to engage the department’s brilliant hermit, Scalapino. Bennett is eventually accepted by the genius as an understudy. As he tries to comprehend the professor’s racing mind, he reminisces on his own life. The book, like time, folds back on itself several times, connecting the past to the present in otherwise incomprehensible ways, opening Bennett up to himself, and to us. And, like time, the book doesn’t end, as much as grows dark at a crossroads, a sort of black hole where Bennett contemplates the way into the future.

Lightman is one of the more intuitive writers of our time, able to provide a window into life with a subtlety that demands attention. His writing is spare, like a well-crafted formula. But the result is never clinical or scientific. He is the rare person who has bridged the gap between the right and left hemisphere of the brain, between the cold logic of science and the mystery of the human spirit.

Bottom Line: Elegiac and lean, intuitive – a brilliant mind lets us peek into the intersection of the scientific workings of the world and how they are a metaphor for our human existence.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #10 Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling

My Review on the book's home page:

S.M. Stirling is one of our local writers; a member of the Critical Mass writing group out of Santa Fe that includes George R. R. Martin, Daniel Abraham, and Melissa Snodgrass. One of those names is certainly widely recognizable, but the others are either known within their markets or regions – an unfortunate situation. Undertaking this book was a function of supporting a local and expanding my reading into the more hard core fantasy world.

Dies the Fire is based on a terribly intriguing concept – everything powered by electricity quits working. Further examination reveals that even guns and combustible materials don’t behave in the same way, burning slowly instead of quickly – so no guns or explosives either. Obviously, the world changes – the apocalyptic event is called, “The Change” in the book. What results is a return to agrarian and feudal organization. The story is told primarily through the eyes of Mike Havel, a US Army Ranger veteran, and Juniper Mackenzie, a Wiccan minstrel. Both establish communities within the Oregon wilderness, along the Willamette River. Portland is taken over by a history professor who establishes the evil kingdom with which Havel’s Bearkillers and Juniper’s Mackensie clan must battle.

Stirling is a master of research and minute detail, to the point of extraction, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how much rein he gives his predilections. Discussing the book with a friend wise in the ways of hardcore fantasy, I learned that this is a common expectation amongst readers of the oeuvre, and a common criticism amongst the outsiders who deign to enter the world. There is a necessity of much of Stirling’s explanation, but it can be wearying sometimes. There is only so much I need to know about the length, width, angle, construction, etc. of every weapon. But beyond the extreme attention to detail, and the occasional bout of fantasy tropism, the book is readable and engaging. The characters are a little stereotypical – that’s where those tropes seem to descend most often – but they are interesting and complete.

There appear to be several other books in this part of Stirling’s series. I say, “this part of the series” because there are other books that relate to how the Change occurred and deal with other locations and times. In any case, Stirling has me wanting to come back for more.

Bottom Line: A great concept and interesting characters, even if the detail can be burdensome – a readable start to a series that I want to read more about.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

I've got Good Benito on my shelves - looks like I need to get to it soon!

>50 blackdogbooks: Well, since I'm definitely within their market, all four authors are well-known names to me. I love Snodgrass' work, only read one work by Abraham but he's on my read-more list. Martin's Game of Thrones series I won't read until he's done, as I refuse to move through all that violence more than once, no matter how good the storytelling. Stirling I don't care for. I've only read one of the books, but it didn't lead me to want to read more.

>46 charl08: Enjoying The Journal of Antonio Montoya very much - thank you. Although I realized belatedly that I have read something set (partly) in New Mexico - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing :-)

Very happy you're enjoying the book. It was a revelation to me.

I've picked Jacobs' book up serveral times but never bought it.

Book #12 The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

My Review on the book's home page:

Middle Earth is a wonderful place to visit, even as darkness begins to devour the sky from the east. That the spark of hope would be found in a diminutive, forgotten creature like a Hobbit – that it would smolder in a green and bountiful forgotten land, focused on the living rather than the battle, only to catch fire and burn so bright – is the ultimate draw.

Is there anyone on the face of the planet who doesn’t know the story of Frodo and the Ring. Even before the Peter Jackson film treatments, Tolkien’s epic quest story was a cultural icon. But Jackson packaged Tolkien’s vision for the masses, thankfully without losing the soul of the story, so that it is even more a part of our collective consciousness.

I read The Hobbit many years ago and was taken with Tolkien’s world. Being an obsessive myself, I figured I had to read everything and should go back to what he considered the start of the story, or at least a rendition of the beginning. And I picked up The Silmarillion – there lay madness, and I quickly abandoned hope. So, reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time, after having watched the Jacskon films, was like coming home.

The Fellowship of the Ring is easily my favorite part of the story because the fellowship is intact and alive throughout. I understand why Frodo must strike out on his own, and I understand why Strider – because I like that part of him much better the kingly parts – has to go his own way. But the sum of their parts is so great, and their collective is so vibrant. The mystery and tension of this book hits a tone that Tolkien never quite regains, save perhaps for the bits about Sam and Frodo on the tower of Cirith Ungol. There are more heart-stopping and heart-rending moments in The Fellowship than in all the rest of the books.

Bottom Line: Maybe as close to perfection as Tolkien ever came – but he wasn’t so enamored with perfection as he was obsessive about breadth and depth.

5 bones!!!!!

Book #13 The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

My Review on the book's home page:

With the Fellowship broken, a necessary but regrettable event, Tolkien loses some of the mystery and wonder of the previous book. The remainder of the story is told only in spurts, not as a whole in a chronological, whole way. So, we follow Strider, Legolas, and Gimli as they try to recover the Hobbits, Pippin and Merry, from the Orc horde that has captured them. Tolkien tells the story from individual perspectives, never marrying up the stories until the Fellowship can get together and compare notes, if at all. And then, in the latter half of the book, he returns us to Frodo and Sam’s journey.

While the individual stories are still masterful, there is always a sense of impatience and longing to get back to the other characters, or to put their stories together with the one you’re reading to make complete sense of the whole.

There are certainly high points in the narrative – the battle of Helm’s deep, with Legolas and Gimli notching kills to beat the others total and Faragorn’s tense palaver with Frodo. But perhaps the best piece of Tolkien’s story is the internal battle played out in the mind of Gollum/Smeagol. When he’s first described by Gandalf in Bags End, there is a sense that he is a complicated and tragic character. But the breaking of his psyche in these pages is masterful storytelling.

It is in The Two Towers that Tolkien’s obsession with the depth and breadth of his world really begins to emerge. Surely, the story would not be the same monumental accomplishment without Tolkien’s attention to such minute and far-reaching detail. But the task sometimes breaks his focus and allows the story to lose momentum.

Bottom Line: With the dissolution of the fellowship, however necessary, Tolkien loses something – though, it’s just a small loss.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #14 The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

My Review on the book's home page:

The Return of the King is my least favorite of the books; it is easily the least focused. Be careful, that is a matter of the books as compared to each other. Tolkien exists outside literatures typical realms. But the last book in the series actually highlights some weaknesses that could be overlooked in the earlier books because the surrounding material was so superior. Here, at the end of the matter, Tolkien exposes himself a bit.

First –
The Return of the Kind – who needs a king? I mean, come on, these are the same countries of men who have repeatedly exposed their weakness to evil and greed. Now, a man appears with an historically important sword and some claims about his lineage, and everyone melts. And I’m not sure that Middle Earth is going to be safe and free of trouble under the reign of men – at least, not these men. Don’t get your mithril shirt in a bunch, Strider is an impressive man, one who I’d follow. Only Faragorn rivals him in terms of judgment, leadership, and skill. But Strider is the more impressive iteration of Aragorn’s personalities. The élan and mystery is lost when he begins to prance about. And Faragorn, while the more sensitive and understanding, lets that quality devolve into weakness too often. I’d just as soon see Gandalf or Galadriel unite the world and lead. For that matter, Samwise, who becomes the Shire potentate, would be a fine unified leader. I just don’t trust that the time of men has come in Middle Earth – and Tolkien has exposed himself here with his over emphasis on the men and the king story. Remember, it was the Fellowship that saved the world, and the man in the group was the one who first put the Fellowship in danger. I would have been okay with less men and more elves or wizards or dwarves.

Second –
Where are the ladies? When Eowyn finally quits listening to all of the men in her life, all trying to protect her from being who she is, well, she kicks some Ring Wraith patootie. And Eowyn is really the only strong female character who has any real place in the story, save Galadriel. You have to look into the appendices before you find much about Arwen, save a couple of conversations and some vague references in The Fellowship. Why wasn’t there a female in the Fellowship? Tolkien overlooked the ladies in all of the books, but exposes himself by writing such a wonderful passage with Eowyn in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, making it clear that there should have been more strong women along the way.

Finally –
For all of Tolkien’s gearing his characters up for battle, there is a pretty significant lack of battles in the books. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the Battle of Helms Deep are really the only ones. There are others that he skims through, and a bunch that he recounts through a character’s eyes after the fact. Couple that with the number of times that someone blows their horn or mounts a horse or grabs a shield and sword, and you start to feel a little cheated. Tolkien spends far too much time preparing for battle and not enough time in it – a little balance is needed. The same phenomenon appears when Tolkien begins peeling everyone off and having the characters saying goodbye. They say goodbye over dinner, then over breakfast, then on their horses, and then someone comes back and does it again.

The Lord of the Rings consumes you, sucks you in and won’t let you go, and that’s a good thing. The few criticisms I’ve offered are in the way of wanting more, wanting the experience to be perfect. But there are a rare few set of tales that can so capture your imagination; Tolkien was a master, if a little obsessive.

Bottom Line: Perhaps it is a melancholy for the way things began in Middle Earth, but, even with a new king, that world is a lesser place without Gandalf and the Elves and Frodo – maybe that’s why it’s hard to like this final chapter as much as the beginning.

4 bones!!!!!

Love that you loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy! The flaws you so nicely captured, are better taken care of, in the writings of George R. R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson, if you are inclined to indulge a bit more in the realm of Fantasy. Yeah, they would have their own set of shortcomings though, but these are some of the best there are, in recent years.

Thought you would might like to read this:-

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a34574/dark-tower-movies-history/

I have a sample of the first Martin downloaded to my pad, but haven't yet got around to trying it. I do like fantasy, just haven't read a ton of it.

I'm glad that my love of the trilogy came through; I really did love it. Everyone else in their reviews focuses on the good, so I thought I'd look a little at the shortcomings, but it didn't mean I am not a total fan.

Thanks for the Dark Tower article - I occasionally search for stories about when/if it will get made. I'm skeptical that anyone can do it justice the way that Jackson did for the Tolkien, but I hope, nonetheless. I'd love to see Roland on the big screen, provided they get the right person to play him. My current favorite choice is Anson Mount - he's on a show called "Hell on Wheels"

Book #15 T. S. Eliot, the Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot

My Review on the book's home page:

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” T.S. Eliot proclaims in his most quotable poem The Waste Lands. Each line groans under the sheer weight of mortality, despair in the face of the inevitable. But rather than propagate that despair, Eliot’s beauty is in his ability to spawn introspection with the dark plight of the subjects in his poems, to evoke abandon as a counter the inescapable.

As a complete volume, Eliot’s most famous are collected - The Waste Lands and The Love Sond of J. Alfred Prufrock - along with some of his lesser known works. Among those lesser known are Four Quartets, free form tone poems that are equally as evocative as anything he ever wrote.

From Burnt Norton:
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

A look at almost any literary journal or publication will provide evidence that Eliot was perhaps the most influential modernist poet, establishing a voice that has survived through multiple generations and still inspires replication. Few poets, or writers of any kind, can create the same sense of urgency in life with their work. Reading Eliot is like glimpsing fate in a mirror’s darkened reflection; it demands attention and quickens the heart to action.

Also collected in the volume is Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Adapted after his death into the Broadway mega-hit Cats, the original work has been all but lost in the bright lights. The fourteen short poems, each deconstructing a different feline personality, are wonders of word play. Short of some of the master fantasy writers, Eliot is unrivaled in his ability to create words and phrases to capture feeling. And the lyrical, whimsical cheekiness of the works display a far different aspect of the writer’s personality; the light to the darker work.

Though Eliot’s plays are also collected here, I read the volume for the poetry only, leaving the plays for a different time. The poetry alone is a lifetime study.

Bottom Line: A complete collection of Eliot’s poetry, the famous and not-so-famous; all provocative and surprising with each reading.

5 bones!!!!!

Oh, yay for 5 bones for Eliot! I'm a fan.

Book #16 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

My Review on the book's home page:

Nothing infects a child of the West like a story with a train chugging through its heart. The tracks spider out across great expanses, carrying life blood to infuse in the extremities where those who don’t know any better flee thinking life is better; carrying dreams, and hope. Great beasts, they shake the ground and stop only when it suits them. With such wild power, the barons of another day effected what they thought was a taming effect on a feral landscape. And though they climbed to new heights of wealth clinging to the steel monsters, they tamed neither the wild lands nor its people. Indeed, the thundering beasts were merely adopted into the Western story, symbols less of wealth and industrialization and more of ingenuity and freedom.

It was with these eyes that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged began for me, centering on the Dagny Taggart, uncommonly strong and frank, trying to keep her grandfather’s train dreams alive while her corrupt and feeble brother, James, destroys the company. She is joined in her quest by Hank Reardon, a genius mechanical and chemical engineer who created a new kind of steel, lighter and stronger than anything that has been seen before. James has partnered with a cabal of greedy businessmen and politicians, in a world-wide scheme to force a new economic system into place that would keep assure their own wealth and power at the expense of the masses and anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Against all odds, and against a powerful enemy, Dagny and Hank set out to build a new railroad line in Colorado, built with Hank’s new steel, and intended to benefit other business and technology mavericks who are imbuing a pallid economy with innovation.

What’s wrong with that? It’s a compelling story with interesting characters on both sides. Heroes and villains set against steel and timber stretching into the great unknown where dreams could come true or be crushed.

What’s wrong is Ayn Rand couldn’t get out of her own way; she couldn’t let her writing, which is sometimes great, and her storytelling, which is solid, stand on their own. Rand tossed a slatted, wooden box out in front of her, in the middle of the masses who might read, who might give her a hearing, and she stepped up above them all. Once she had their full attention, she begun to preach with the stamina of the apostle Paul, who was stopped only by a man who, exhausted, fell out of a window.

Rand preaches through her characters voices, either the evil pseudo-socialists, intent on enslaving the stupid, inept masses and lining their pockets or the idealistic and fiercely free market heroes. They speak in whole paragraphs, in whole pages and people don’t talk that way. They repeat the philosophies, either good or bad, ad nauseam, until a reader can be confused about whether the page or chapter is one that’s already behind them. The resulting bloated text is at least three quarters longer than it would have to be to tell the story, or to carry Rand’s message, and still she preaches on. As the book crawls toward its crescendo, John Galt, a leader of the ‘free market or die’ set, hacks the radio and television frequencies and launches into the mother of all speeches. He holds the world hostage until they hear him out, just as Rand is holding the reader hostage until the speech, clocking in at 70 pages, is over. Galt insists on the last word, and so does Rand, even though she has beat everyone over the head for 1000 pages before Galt finally makes his complete case in person. I suspect I’m not the only reader who just turned past the pages until it was over.

So, why persevere so long with such a tiresome book. I suppose there was some part of me that didn’t want Rand to win, that didn’t want her to have the last word. But what drove me on was wanting to know what happened to Dagny and Hank, what happened to the Taggart Transcontinental Line. Of course, I suspected their fate, as Rand is not shy about structuring the plot to punish her characters and make an example of them, just as she continues to punish her readers. But the seed of a good story was still there, compelling me to hang onto the train as it streaked through the desert toward oblivion.

And Rand makes the occasional point about society and the conflicted human heart that is keenly observed and quickening. Here’s one, about how people can often reduce themselves to their minimum thought capacity in the face of adversity and how it exposes them to the corruptor’s control:
“You see, people don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue – a highly intellectual virtue – out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.”
Anyone who would doubt the keenness of that observation need only look at any period of history in the United States that coincides with a Presidential election.

Here’s another, where she sees victory in a full and frank discussion of corruption, where the wink and the nod rule:
“There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that’s all it would take to blast your whole, big complex structure, with all your laws and guns – just somebody naming the exact nature of what you’re doing.”

Another thing that kept me reading is that Rand, when she briefly discontinues writing like she was composing a pamphlet, is a good writer. She really is – listen:
“A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in the sloppy wads between sky and mountain, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. A net of moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pin-prick on her face once in a while, which was neither a raindrop nor a snowflake. The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung non-committally to some sort of road’s middle; Board of Director’s weather, she thought.
Obviously, this passage is used at a time of ambiguity in the character’s life. Dagny is feeling the same tug and push toward opposite poles of her mind, and Rand stands surrounds her in the vague.

And another passage, Dagny sees a tramp aboard one of her trains and Rand describes the man through her eyes:
“An aging tramp had taken refuge in the corner of her vestibule. He sat on the floor, his posture suggesting that he had no strength left to stand up or to care about being caught. He was looking at the conductor, his eyes observant, fully conscious, but devoid of any reaction. … He moved obediently to rise, his hand groping upward along the rivets of the car’s wall. She saw him glance at her and glance away, as if she were merely another inanimate fixture of the train. … The tramp’s suit was a mass of careful patches on a cloth so stiff and shiny with wear that one expected it to crack like glass if bent; but she noticed the collar of his shirt: it was bone-white from repeated laundering and it still preserved a semblance of shape. He had pulled himself up to his feet, he was looking indifferently at the black hole upon miles of uninhabited wilderness where no one would see the body or hear the voice of a mangled man, but the only gesture of concern he made was to tighten his grip on a small, dirty bundle, as if to make sure he would not lose it in leaping from the train.”
You can feel the weary and conflicted nobility of the tramp vividly in the description of his clothes, in his gaze, and in his dedication to survival. Though near the end of his rope, he battles to maintain an appearance and holds dearly to what he has left of himself.

The subtlety and acute observation of which Rand is capable is sadly brief, overcome for great lengths by her fist pounding sermon. But there was enough of it that I wanted to finish. I can’t recommend the book to anyone, given that I finished it out of a sense of principle more than enjoyment. Her earlier book, The Fountainhead, offered more of what made Atlas Shrugged barely bearable: a solid story, interesting and diverse characters, and a dedication to writing over delivering a message. Though, Rand was much more proud of Atlas Shrugged, calling it her opus, and The Fountainhead just a slight prelude on the concepts that she felt she should develop for the masses. This book has broken me the need to read her other novels, even if they were written earlier and might offer the more subtle, the better Rand. If anyone asks, I’ll direct them to The Fountainhead, if they simply must read Rand.

It’s unfortunate that her writing, which has transcendent moments, is so colored by her philosophy and sermonizing. She was much more prolific in the world of the essay and political or economic thought. And so many snake-oil salesmen have latched onto her system of beliefs that she is either unflinchingly revered as a Greek goddess or openly ridiculed – and there’s more to her than either of those thin characterizations. But it is her own fault. She felt the need to preach rather than tell a story, an inclination that has soured me on many other writers, including the canonized like Dorris Lessing and James Joyce. I don’t want to feel like I’m getting a lesson with every word that I read.

So, this train keeps chugging, but Ayn Rand was put off at the last station before the desert begins in earnest.

Bottom Line: A tiresome book, told from atop a soap box, but one that has the seeds of a good story and transcendent moments of writing.

2 ½ bones!!!!!

I love reading your reviews, Mac. They are better than the book itself! However, although this is one of the books that was "in" when I was in college, it's one I successfully avoided.

You were saved. Thanks, roni

Book #17 The World According to Garp by John Irving

My Review on the book's home page:

“{S}o here it is: an epilogue ‘warning us about the future,’ as T. S. Garp might have imagined it.”

Halfway through John Irving’s The World According to Garp it becomes terribly difficult not to wonder how similar Garp’s world is to Irving’s. But Garp himself ridicules any autobiographical instinct in novelists, claiming that such fiction writing is the hallmark of a weak imagination. Of course, part of Garp’s story is his own writing, of which the final installment is a novel titled The World According to Bensenhaver – giving a tongue firmly in the cheek feeling to Garp’s ridicule. There is a sense that Irving is reflecting himself through multiple mirrors, his image refracted smaller and smaller through a funhouse hallway, as he tells Garp’s story.

And Garp’s story is a doozy – conceived by a nurse who hates sex so much but wants a child so badly that she rapes a brain damaged soldier with a constant reflexive erection; befriended by former pro football linebacker post-operative transsexual; married to a devoted philanderer; father to a one-armed, one-eyed son who paints (and the story of how the boy’s eye is lost is the kind of fiction that argues against Twain’s proclamation that truth is stranger than fiction); and adoptive father of a daughter with no tongue. With his own writing career budding, Garp’s mother writes an autobiography that seeds a feminist movement, forever casting Garp as an interloper. No matter how he tries he can never emerge from his mother’s shadow, seemingly cast in the whites of her nurse’s uniform rather than grays. And no matter how much he runs or writes or worries, life’s violent waves always carry him out into the tide.

Violence and death’s looming presence permeate Garp’s story, just as they do his writing. In describing Gapr’s first story, Irving says of it, “the history of a city was like the history of a family – there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other.” The only thing that remains is memory, which is how Garp views his own writing. For Garp, and you suspect Irving as he is reflected through the funhouse surfaces, sex is just another chaotic tool that violence and death carry in their repertoire. So much of the Greek-like tragedy that befalls Garp starts or ends with sex, as if there is no more destructive force in the word – a perspective largely in line with his mother’s views. Garp’s story is Greek, a comedy in trees but a tragedy when viewing the forest.

As dark and distasteful as some of the events can be, The World According to Garp is a world that demands attention. The character’s eccentricity and depth compels the reader along, even if it’s because you can’t turn away, because you have to look. That depth is Irving’s saving grace, and the book’s.

Bottom Line: An eccentrically populated book; even if a little too morose and over-sexed, the characters’ uniqueness is compelling.

4 bones!!!!!

I haven't read that one, but it's been on my radar for a long time - great review!

Read it many years ago. Confirmed my notion that mainstream best-seller fiction just wasn't my thing. Excellent review, as always.

Thanks, ladies.

Though I'm not sure I'd classify that one as mainstream, roni

Trust me, when it came out, it was all the popular press was talking about, Mac!

Wikipedia: " Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for several years. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979,1 and its first paperback edition won the Award the following year."

I didn't realize the buzz it made. I stand corrected.

Irving doesn't get that much attention any longer. I've got a few more on my shelves that I'm going to try at some point.

Thanks for your wonderful reviews.

Book #18 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

My Review on the book's home page:

“Fact is, religious faith, which encodes the highest aspirations of the human race, is now, in our country, the servant of lowest instincts, and God is the creature of evil.”

Fanatics swirl through Salman Rushdie’s surreal vision in The Satanic Verses, heralded by an archangel and a devil falling from an exploding sky over the murky waters of the English Channel. Gibreel Fashita and Saladin Chamcha miraculously survive a terrorist bombing in the sky over London. As they fall, they go through a transformation, Gibreel in his mind and Saladin in his physical appearance. Deposited on a moor and taken in by an elderly widow, their transformations continue, Gibreel begins to lose touch with reality in spiritual dreams where he is an archangel and herald of an apocalypse, while Saladin undergoes a temporary physical metamorphosis into a goat-like demon.

If the psychedelic visions suffered by the two descending chrysalis aren’t enough to set the stage, Rushdie reveals his strategy in one of Gibreel’s early dreams. Washed up at Rosa Diamond’s home, convalescing through his transformation, he dreams of Rosa’s past in Argentina, where she and her husband met and were married. The dream, like many of Gibreel’s is an amalgamation of past and present and future, but it focuses on a gift from an amorous neighbor to Rosa: a copy of Amerigo Vespucci’s account of his voyages. The writer is described: “The man was a notorious fantasist, of course … but fantasy can be stronger than fact.” Rushdie announces his perspective with this description, announces that the fantasies he is about to weave will instruct, will uncover the truths of the world as he sees them.

The truth? Fanaticism, in all its many forms, whether religious or political or material or social, is a deadly distortion. And Rushdie gives no quarter to any platform. In one of Gibreel’s many dream lives, he consorts with Ayesha, a street urchin who convinces a village to walk a pilgrimage to Mecca through the Arabian Sea. Mizra Saeed, an unbeliever, refuses to walk with the pilgrims, following them in a Mercedes, heckling and cajoling them at every stop to abandon their suicide mission. Rushdie satirizes material fanaticism in the passage, “One day he got back to the station wagon to find that an empty coconut-shell thrown from the window of a passing bus had smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked, now, like a spider’s web full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces out, and the glass diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the road and into the car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness of earthly possession, but a secular man lives in the world of things and Mizra Saeed did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen.”

Rushdie turns his eye to social and political fanaticism as well, describing one character’s strength as a “perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the languages of power.” And the story follows Saladin through a Kafkaesque ordeal at the hands of the police who charge him for his attempt to enter the country illegally with his fall from the exploding plane, and then later through a race riot sparked by the police murder of a racial activist. As with his other stories, Rushdie carefully examines the difficulty of racial identity in a modern world where borders and associations are constantly shifting. Saladin himself is deeply conflicted about his own identity. Though an Indian Muslim, he struggles to leave Bombay and Islam behind, aching to be affiliated with London, to be a Brit. But as the book closes, Saladin returns to his childhood home and reconciles with his father and his family, achieving a measure of contentment.

But Rushdie reserves the better part of his energy for religious fanaticism. As the leading quote above demonstrates, there is a hair’s breadth between heartfelt spiritual fervor and selfish, corruptive misuse. Of the most controversial passages from Satanic Verses are Gibreel’s dreams of Mahound, a thinly veiled re-telling of Muhammad’s life. Rushdie’s most striking image in these accounts is a battle between Gibreel and a Pagan goddess. During the battle in the skies, the villagers below run toward the Imam’s palace for shelter. As he fights at the Imam’s will, Gibreel observes the Imam below lying in the palace court, his mouth yawning open at the gates, as the fleeing people march into his mouth and he swallows them whole. In another dream, Baal, a poet, serves as Mahound’s scribe. As the Prophet speaks, Baal begins to alter the words. Surprised at first with his own boldness, he becomes frightened that the Prophet didn’t catch on, that his doubts about the divinity of the Prophet and the message had been right all along. And in Gibreel’s dreams about Ayesha’s pilgrimage, she grows ever more strict and fanatical. When she is challenged, she disassociates herself, claiming only to be a Messenger and promising, vaguely, that the pilgrim’s sacrifices will be richly rewarded. Eventually, one of the pilgrims finally challenges her directly, “Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent? What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?”

Sadly, the question that the pilgrim, and Rushdie, seem to avoid is a deeper one about whether the sacrifice and devotion is required by God for fulfillment of his own need or rather as a way to transmute the pilgrim’s own heart. In other words, while Ayesha may be driven by her own selfish desires, the pilgrim’s premise is faulty – that God requires something because he needs it. A perfectly reasonable alternative is that God requires sacrifice and devotion because the pilgrim needs it, and that Ayesha and Mahound and other religious fanatics, have corrupted the divine. Rushdie almost gets to this perspective – during one of the Imam’s rants, he says, “We long for the eternal, and I am eternity.” This is essentially a reshaping of Solomon’s proclamation in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

While Rushdie laments the consequences of fanaticism, he also revels in the beautiful, messy contradictions of the world. Alleluia Cone, Gibreel’s real life lover, but also the mold for Al-Lat, the Pagan goddess, in Gibreel’s dream world, is told by her father, a Polish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp, about “the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives. … Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straightjacket tailor. … The world is incompatible, just never forget it, gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can’t ask for a wilder place.” Much of this sentiment is reduced into Gibreel and Saladin’s own minds, hyper-focusing the wild diversity of thought and emotion into the mind of one man alone, its larger manifestation projected onto the face of the earth in a Felliniesque muddle.

The story of The Satanic Verses sadly escaped the pages of the book, allowing Rushdie an even wider arena for his message. Islamic fundamentalists viewed the work as blasphemous and the Ayatollah Khomeini called for a fatwa against Rushdie. The book was reviled and burned by these fundamentalists. Politicians, including high-ranking British parliament members, called for the book to be banned, fearing religious and racial violence. Attempts were made on Rushdie’s life. When he went into hiding and received protective police assistance, the fatwa was shifted to include publishers and translators. A Japanese translator was stabbed to death; an Italian translator survived a stabbing; a Norwegian publisher survived a shooting; and 37 people were killed in Turkey when a Turkish translator was targeted. The fanatical reaction to the publication of the book could’ve easily been an epilogue to the book itself.

Ultimately, The Satanic Verses is a solid, if extremely subtle book. Though it doesn’t seem subtle from the subject matter, so much religious and racial material underpins the book that many of the connections can be missed. Thankfully, the Rushdie’s skillfully provides an evocative and thought provoking story that can be read on multiple levels. Nothing about the book on its face should’ve caused the fanatical reaction, but that’s just Rushdie winking at us all.

Bottom Line: Another epic of magical realism; the irony of the book is rooted in the fanatical reaction the book engendered, mirroring Rushdie’s own themes.

4 bones!!!!!

Have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE your detailed, thoughtful reviews?

Thanks, roni. Much appreciated.

>63 blackdogbooks: I really want to read Atlas Shrugged just so I can see for myself and not feel in the dark. Also, I'd like to see how 'the other half' think ;)

>66 blackdogbooks: this is one of the first adult books I remember reading as a teen (the first was Chickenhawk- my dad's). I loved it then, and should read it again now to see how it- or rather, I- have changed.

Book #19 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

My Review on the book's home page:

The annual airing of Gone with the Wind was a big event in our home with my older sisters glued to the television for two nights, aflutter with every smirk and every eyebrow twitch from Clark Gable. I tried to be somewhere else when the opening credits rolled – I still have a vivid memory of an brilliant fire-orange sky silhouetting a large barren tree and an extremely grave orchestral production playing in the background that gives me an urge to run. My sisters on an old, uncomfortable couch – it was orange, as well, now that I think of it – were the ones really glued to the screen. My mother always had something else to do, sewing in her lap or shelling pecans into a bowl. And, like me, this was one of those rare times when my father disappeared from his ‘easy chair,’, though I’m not sure where he went or what he did for those two nights.

Scampering through the living room and into the kitchen for a snack – always upsetting the girls who were worried that I might obscure Rhett’s striking profile for two seconds as I ran in front of the television – I captured a few other long lasting perceptions. Women resembled the tiny figurines from grandma’s house, dangerously swollen hoop skirts around cinched-in waists and garish, oversized hats framing china doll skin. The men were as preposterously dressed, at least through a young boy’s eyes, peacocking in bright, shiny suits; they acted funny, too, these strange men, always flitting around the women, one minute grabbing them up in violent embraces and then shoving them away or ignoring them altogether. And the black people spoke a foreign language, as far as I could tell.

Over the years, I always associated Gone with the Wind with my sisters. It never occurred to me that my mother was really paying attention, that she followed the story or that it had any impact on her. I found out I was wrong as I read the book for the first time and found Scarlett declaring, “I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow’s another day.” Countless times mom used those words to soothe me through some adolescent fit. She’d smile at me, fix me with her black, Irish eyes, and say, “Don’t worry, honey. Just remember, tomorrow’s another day.” So, every time I read Scarlett’s mantra in the book, I saw my mother’s face again, felt her calloused, work-worn hands around mine.

Of course, my mother identified with Gone with the Wind, though I can’t say whether it was the book or the movie that captured her. But it wasn’t that handsome rogue Rhett Butler that drew her in – it was Scarlett. After all, mom was a West Texas rancher’s daughter. She was strong-willed and wild – my grandmother recalled spanking her nearly every morning before she walked down the dirt road to school. After one whipping, she told Gra’am, “When I grow up, I’m going to have baby girl and I’m going to name her ‘mother’ and I’m going to whip her every day.” I can see Scarlett’s defiance in my mother’s steely gaze, feel the same independent grit radiating off them both. But it wasn’t the pre-Civil war Scarlett she saw herself in, not the spoiled child in frills – it was the reconstruction Scarlett, chapped hands and sun-burnt from picking cotton in a near barren field. When Scarlett swears never to be hungry again, my mother’s recycling of useless things and keeping of food long past its freshness made sense to me, because mom was also a depression child. She and her siblings wore cardboard soled shoes, handing them down through five children regardless the size or number of worn through holes. They drank goat’s milk and ate beans and scraped at the dirt for whatever would grow. “Tomorrow is another day,” allowed Scarlett, and my mother, to forget about the day’s hunger and pain by focusing on the next day’s hope, even if it was a dim and vague hope.

Like Scarlett and my mother, Mitchell was a rare breed, penning a book about the Civil War and setting it around a female heroine. The book is as deeply researched and detailed as any other on the war between the states, offering a rich history of the shifting momentums in the war with each battle and a skilled commentary, through Rhett and Ashley’s eyes, on the seeds of the South’s ultimate destruction. Yet the book’s focus never wavers from those who were left behind when the bullets began to fly. We don’t see the battles through the soldier’s eyes, we learn about them as families did, through gossip and word of mouth. We don’t lie on the battlefields with the wounded and dying, we wait on the street outside the newspaper office with the whole of Atlanta for the dead’s names to be published. We don’t march with the hungry, exhausted soldiers, we hide in the house with the women and children, afraid and paranoid as the invading Yankees ride the roads. Woven through it all is Mitchell’s view on life as a Southern woman, relegated to be an object of beauty and desire but required by circumstances to be the independent, powerful nucleus that could sustain a family’s survival. I suspect my mother saw herself, and her own mother, in that incongruity, and reveled in the power that making your place in the world brings.

Bottom Line: Not just your mother’s bodice ripper – there’s untold depths to this classic.

5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year.

Great to read your thoughts on how an earlier generation of reader approached a book that I must admit, I mostly see in terms of the clichés derived from the film.

Nice review!

Thanks, you two.

Gone with the Wind was one of those books that, while I was reading it, you could be standing right next to me calling my name and I wouldn't hear you. Sucked me right in. I'm so glad that you liked it, too!

Book #20 & 21 My Antonia by Willa Cather and Beloved by Toni Morrison

My Review for My Antonia on the book's home page:

My Review for Beloved on the book's home page:

Life is filled with remembrance, honeyed with nostalgia or seasoned with sour regret. Some of the best books tap into the yen to look back at a time that has lost reality’s sharp edges, glowing in our collective memory as a better or simpler time. Others seek to shine hindsight’s harsh light, to expose any such wistful longing as a distorting toxin. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere between.

A bunny cake, with coconut frosting is my earliest memory. I was obsessed with Bugs Bunny; his silly antics struck a cord with my as yet undeveloped brain. There was something special about that crazy animal, able to outwit man and beast alike yet still humble enough to not take himself too seriously. Believing she could work any miracle, in the kitchen or beyond, I begged for a Bugs Bunny cake, with coconut frosting, of course. These were the days before many specialty bakeries existed, before the country developed a sense of entitlement to purchase anything that could be imagined, when little boy’s dreams depended on a mother’s ingenuity and devotion. Baking a cake in such an unusual and intricate shape didn’t seem like too much to ask. He was a famous and heroic figure, after all – there must be cakes made in his likeness. Like all things I asked my mother to produce, the bunny cake appeared, furry with coconut and complete with black whiskers. I’m told that I can’t remember this event, as it was my second birthday, that I must have seen a picture that I’ve confused as a memory. But no one can produce the picture, and I remember the candlelight dancing across that bunny’s coconut fur. That event stands in my memory like a baptism of sorts, initiating me into the faith that my mother could do anything – she need only be asked. Of course, in later years, apostasy arrived with a teenaged fury. But like all prodigals, I returned as I grew to respect the love and devotion that produced the miracles of my youth – the middle ground between nostalgia and reality’s harsh light.

Willa Cather’s elegiac My Antonia is hazy with honeyed nostalgia. It is a book sitting atop a small rise in the plains and looking back over what has become of a way of life, of a place and people deeply rooted in the soil watching as the world careens off in a different direction. There is a truth to the remembrance, to freezing a place’s sensations in amber to look back on as encouragement against tomorrow’s severity. And that’s what My Antonia is about: Jim Burden, unhappy with his job’s mundanity, looking back on his childhood hero and love, Antonia. Her wildness, her steely determination, her beauty; all things that he associates with the vast prairie where they lived and things he longs for in his adult life. Listen to Willa as Jim remembers evenings with Antonia:
“All those afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prarie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death – heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.”
As beautiful as Jim’s memory is, it is tainted by the place from where he views it all, as you can see in the next paragraph:
“How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prarie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.”
Those shadows that were sometimes ahead and sometimes chasing them are the events that cast them away from youth’s simple and enveloping beauty. It is these shadows that Jim speaks from as a man, longing for the childhood’s lost rays. They are the shadows from which I see the candlelight dancing on a cake in the shape of a bunny.

On the other hand, for the characters in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “Remembering seemed unwise.” Rather than looking back into soft amber light, Morrison’s characters speak from the shadows into darkness. Indeed, the fowl past is embodied in a specter that has seized flesh and blood to haunt Sethe and her daughter Denver. Having killed her infant rather than see it be enslaved, the child first haunts her home as a poltergeist, and then, when a threatening force arrives in Paul D, an old friend, the ghost takes on human form, pulling Sethe and Denver into an obsessive spiral. Though Beloved is the impetus for the plot, the story is really how Sethe and Paul D arrived at this point in their lives, how they survived brutal conditions to see freedom and how the choices that led to their freedom haunt their souls. Looking back for these two is to look into an abyss. And yet at the end of the book, Paul D rescues Sethe from a suicidal malaise, remembering what another of their friends said about the love of his life:
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
Even from the darkness, Paul D sees a faint light in the past, a salvation in his memory. That’s that candlelight I see dancing on a bunny’s coconut fur in my memory.

There are few books more beautifully written than My Antonia and few books more stark and difficult than Beloved. But they both stand for what remembrance holds, whether dark or amber, and that in the light of either, hope glimmers.

Bottom Line: The light and dark of memory.

4 bones!!!!!

Mac, it is so good to see posts from you! I do remember your rating system.

What a great review of My Antonia. I haven't read that yet. I know I own a copy. I simply have to go find it, which is not an easy task given all the books that are stored in various nooks and crannies.

Hi Mac,

Our views couldn't be more different on Beloved, we haven't had too many of those, have we?

It was a hard book to read, Piyush - and I had moments where I wasn't enjoying it but she saved the book for me in the last half of it. My Antonia was much better throughout.

Book #22 Lightning People by Christopher Bollen

My Review on the book's home page:

The post-9/11 New York City landscape has always looked like the kid in grade-school who fell during recess and knocked out his front teeth two years early. The smile’s expanse tweaks your expectations – what’s supposed to be there, isn’t there anymore. And the gaping hole, right out front for everyone to see, prominently displayed every time that mouth opens, produces a shared humiliation and awkwardness.

Lightning People, Christoper Bollen’s debut novel from 2011, begins with the premise that the World Trade Center’s absence also produced a freakish lighting strike phenomenon. Without the tall towers standing guard at the island’s southern tip, lightning had begun to strike many rooftops around the city, killing storm watchers and rooftop visitors. Bollen’s idea is that most of the dead are Midwesterners, mounting the roofs to create a plainsman’s perspective that is lost in a steel and glass city.

What a hook? If it wasn’t bad enough that terrorists attacked New Yorkers, now Mother Nature is bent on their destruction. Sadly, that prologue is little more than foreshadowing for one of the characters, and little more is ever said about the lightning strikes. The logical assumption is that the lightning attacks are a metaphor for the void created in New Yorker’s lives following the 9/11 attacks. And his characters certainly do seem to be adrift in their lives and emotions. But Bollen never really plumbs these depths, choosing to focus on the baggage that the characters have brought with them to New York –
Joseph, the Midwesterner who is convinced that he will die in his 40th year; Del, a Greek ophiologist who marries Joe for a green card; William, Joe’s paranoid and dissembling friend; and the Singh siblings, one an artist and one a financial analyst. How each of these people would have processed the dread and emptiness of post-9/11 New York would have made for great reading. But Bollen concocts the dread from their own histories and selfish choices. It’s a disappointment.

Bollen is a good writer, and a good story-teller; it’s just that this particular story didn’t live up to his potential, or the potential such a story presents. There were stretches, particularly as Joseph tells his family’s history, that were extremely interesting. But Bollen always returned to the shallow end.

Bottom Line: A writer and a story that want to and should be more, but seem stuck in the shallow end.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #23 Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

My Review on the book's home page:

Back in 2007, Plainsong found its way onto my shelves. At that time, the book was already almost ten years old and Haruf had published another book, Eventide, set in his imaginary homestead on Colorado’s front range, Holt. Since I don’t follow literary awards very closely, I didn’t know that Haruf had been a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 for Plainsong. And it appeared that, outside a small loyal readership, mostly from the West and Southwest, Haruf didn’t garner much attention. Even today, a search for him online doesn’t produce much information. But those of us who know him through his simple but deeply felt writing know what the world lost in November, 2014, when he past.

After I read Plainsong, I went to the nearest bookstore and bought the follow-up, Eventide, immediately. I couldn’t wait to learn more about the people in Holt, CO. They were real people, living everyday lives, but the emotion coursing through these books was evidence that haruf understood something many writers never grasp – the small triumphs and evils of everyday life are imminently more powerful than anything else. In a publishing world bent on high octane and three movie deals, Haruf focused on a small town and the powerful drama that plays out in daily life. I waited impatiently along with all the other Haruf fans until he published the next installment for Holt, CO – Benediction, published in 2013. I devoured that one immediately, ever amazed that Haruf could find new stories and highlight the simple nobility we overlook every day.

Since May, this year, I’ve been putting off reading what will be the last Holt, CO, story, Our Souls at Night, published posthumously. Since learning of his death in 2014, I’ve been mourning his loss as a writer, and the end of the Holt stories. I didn’t want to read the last one because that would be to accept that there would be no more. While waiting for Benediction’s publication, I scoured used book stores for Haruf’s early novels, The Tie that Binds and Where You Once Belonged, and I haven’t read those yet. But going back to those isn’t the same as knowing that Haruf is at his typewriter teasing out new tales for me. Every time I looked at Our Souls at Night on the shelf, I grew sad and moved to a different shelf, putting off the inevitable parting.

I finally got the courage to sit down with Haruf one last time yesterday, and it was as sad a parting as I expected it would be. Every page I turned took me one step further away from him. The book was as beautiful and elegiac as the other stories, if even a little more simple. This one follows just two people in Holt – the others usually had a larger cast of characters and stories that intertwined. But the smaller focus seemed a more appropriate way to say goodbye. The book discovers Addie Moore on Louis Waters’ doorstep. They are both in their seventies and widowed. Addie asks Louis to come over to her house at night and sleep with her. In the setting of their lives, they both find that life has surprises left for them; that companionship and discovery doesn’t have a time stamp on it. They also learn that no amount of wisdom and freedom can stem the selfishness and envy of small minded people, or that the little personal evils in the world are so much more painful.

I can’t recommend Haruf more highly to those of you reading this review. Eventually, he received a little recognition, the Wallace Stegner award (appropriate given his style and content) and the Dos Passos Prize for Literature, but he is far too little known and read.

I’ll go back and read the early Haruf books someday soon. But the experience will be stained with a longing for a friend like few others.

Bottom Line: Another simple but deeply felt story; the last parting of a friend that I’ve enjoyed a great deal over the years.

5 bones!!!!!


A favorite for the year!

I hope no one flags me for this, but I wanted to let you guys know that a bunch of us LT'ers were inspired by the site and our own conversations to compile a book of our reviews - And we have self-published it. We're pretty excited about the project. All the proceeds will be donated to a charity for down syndrome, but I wanted to let you all know about it and provide some links. All of the reviews come from LT'ers like you and the range of books/literature is pretty wide, as is the style of reviews. I contributed several reviews/essays as well.

Please, don't read this as shameless marketing - it's just a cool thing that was inspired by LT. What better than a book about books inspired by a website about books and compiled by book lovers.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here are some options:

The RunningGirlPress web site: http://runninggirlpress.com/ - has ordering links in it, and pages about the book.

and here are direct links:
https://www.createspace.com/5760004 - to order the paperback book
https://www.createspace.com/Special/Help/Order/BookShippingRates.jsp - so you can look up the shipping rates for shipping through CreateSpace

https://solla-carrock.selz.com/ for ordering an electronic book (ePub, kindle (mobi) or pdf)

We are also on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-Opera-Tropic-Ideas/dp/098882924X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UT....

And one of the book designers even created calendars:

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/969428?__r=603760 square calendar (8 x 8)
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/969442?__r=603760 standard calendar (8.25 x 10.75)

>87 blackdogbooks: Wow! What a well-written, wonderful review! Thanks!

Good luck with the book project: what a good cause you have chosen to support. I hope it is successful and raises a good pot for the charity.

>87 blackdogbooks: I feel the same way about Haruf and his books. I've had Benediction on my shelf since it was published and just can not bring myself to read it.

Book #24 First Blood by David Morrell

My Review on the book's home page:

The process by which characters and stories become a cultural icon is complex. It’s hard to know what will tap into society or time’s zeitgeist. In the early 1980’s, fresh off the critical and financial successes with the Rocky franchise, Sylvester Stallone took up a project that had been kicked around Hollywood for years – First Blood. He helped to co-write the screenplay for the movie and starred as the story’s main character – John Rambo. That character, emerging at the cold war’s height, captured the world’s imagination. The film still recalls the image of Stallone, headbanded and sneering, with an M-60 in his bulging arms. The image, and the movie, stand for a lost America fighting through a political wilderness. But the adaptation, while still a great movie, loses some of the heart and individuality from Morrell’s original book.

Morrell’s First Blood is as much about another man, Teasle, a Korean war veteran who is now the chief in the sleepy Kentucky burg of Madison. Teasle, like John Rambo, is coping with his own problems – a departed wife and a difficult father figure. Rambo, when he hits the town limits of Teasle’s town is deep in post-traumatic stress, primarily from his time as a POW. The two, at odds from the outset, seek to control their inner demons by controlling the world around them, each escalating reactions until they reach a fatal critical mass. Along the way, the book, in equal parts, descends into the troubled inner worlds of the men. Each is heroic and each is cowardly, depending on whether they are facing the world or themselves, as they see themselves in the other while they battle. Killing the other man is to essentially overcome the weakness they see in themselves. Stallone, when he wrote the screenplay, changed the ending of the book, which fundamentally changed the point of Morrell’s book. In the movie, Rambo turns himself in to the authorities. In the book, Teasle and Rambo push each other to the brink.
Most people have either seen the movie, or are familiar with the movie since it has survived the decades in our zeitgeist. But First Blood, the book, is a revelation. Where the movie hints at Rambo’s raging mental state, the book lays it out on the page for all to experience. And the book goes the extra step to better explain the reasons for Chief Teasle’s mad spiral. Such a successful film adaptation is two-edged sword – providing flesh and blood to a writer’s characters and delivering success and notoriety to a writer while necessarily violently murdering the story’s original heart and intent.

Pick up the book – resurrect the real Rambo and Teasle.

Bottom Line: Yes, it’s the inspiration for Stallone’s Rambo – but there are layers to this book and story that the movie could never touch.

5 bones!!!!!

Book #25 The Alchemist by Paul Coelho

My Review on the book's home page:

Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist by a small, Brazilian publishing house. Since that time, the book has continued to gain popularity with its universal message of hope and choice. Most view the simple story as an allegory, but I like to think of it in more Biblical terms, as a parable.

Santiago, a meek Spanish shepherd, dreams one night of a treasure, buried in the Egyptian pyramids. The dream is so vivid that Santiago decides that it has heralded his own destiny. When he sets off to find the treasure, he meets Melchizedek, a man who claims to be the King of Salem. The king instructs Santiago on the concept of a Personal Legend, telling the boy, "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.” That belief sustains Santiago through his quest. As he meets other dreamers and philosophers along the way, he gains clues and icons to help him unlock the treasure’s true meaning.

As a parable, the story is evocative and quickening. It inspires dedication to deeply held dreams and better choices in life. Coelho remains dedicated to the style throughout, never wavering, suggesting that his own deeply held dream of becoming a writer was inextricably tied up in the book’s writing.

The experience of reading the book was enhanced for me by watching a movie about Coelho’s life and struggles to become a writer – Paul Coelho’s Best Story. The dedication and fight he exhibited for his dream stretches the boundaries of credulity. That he believed in his own Personal Legend long before he was published is clear from the path of his life.

Bottom Line: A modern day parable about choosing to live the best life.

4 bones!!!!!

Great to see you around, Mac, and some good reviews. I may have to try the Coelho.

Book #26 Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute

My Review on the book's home page:

Keith Stewart is a content man, having created a niche with his miniature machines. He and his wife, unable to bear children, have settled into a modest and happy existence. After helping his brother-in-law and sister secret a stash of diamonds in a yacht, he becomes he only person who knows about his nieces inheritance when the couple dies in a sailing accident on a remote tropical island. As the guardian for his niece, he realizes that he doesn’t have the resources to provide for her and sets out on a journey to recover the diamonds. Without much money, he must rely on his wit and peculiar talents to make his way by rail and plane and ship. The motley bunch of people who help him along the way are eccentric, each more colorful than the last.

Shute’s book is a rare look at a contented and modest hero – sweet in disposition and noble in mind. His journey isn’t the typical arc for a hero as we often think of them, but it’s comforting to watch the character’s creativity and self-reliance. Keith’s choices, and what motivates them, are instructive in our time when most people are obsessed with popularity and self-promotion. To share the story of a man who wants nothing more than to provide for those he loves and maintain his contented life is a pleasant surprise.

Bottom Line: Contentment and nobility embodied in the everyday man.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #26 Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

My Review on the book's home page:

Paul Raymant is a ‘lovable’ misanthrope – immune to his own insufferableness and happy for it. He is run down while on his bicycle and loses a leg in the accident. It leaves him dependent on others in a way that is distasteful to him but doesn’t allow for the possibility of any other course.

There wasn’t anything particularly interesting about the story for the better part of half the book. And then … something happens, something that throws the book and the reading experience into chaos. Raymant begins to come alive with the arrival of a home medical assistant – she’s younger and attractive, and he begins to believe that he is in love with her. Pretty typical fare. But another woman, Elizabeth Costello, then invades his life, and his house. Her explanation for her arrival, though cryptic, suggests that she is a writer and that Paul is her character. She refuses to leave until he makes up his mind to do something, to make a choice, proclaiming throughout that she doesn’t have any control over him, that she only records what he does.

When I finished the book, I was still in doubt about whether Raymant, or Costello, for that matter, was a reliable narrator. The book begins with Raymant careening through the air – so, maybe the whole thing is a figment of his adrenaline induced imagination, the story playing out in the few seconds he is airbound. Or maybe Costello is telling the truth, and she’s meta-stepped into her own narrative to get a closer look at the character’s thought process. Or maybe, as Raymant suspects, Costello is as mad as a monkey on a trike. Whatever the answer, and it still escapes me, it sustained me through the latter half of the book, hoping all the while for clarity.

I don’t know whether this is a good book or a ‘cute’ book, rich in technique and short on quality. But I kept watching the accident as it unfolded, right through to the last page.

Bottom Line: The twist will either keep you reading or turn you off altogether.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Thanks, roni - more to come. I'm behind.

A set of great reviews. Thanks. Hope you have a restful and pleasant holiday.

For my Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Holiday image this year (we are so diverse!), I've chosen this photograph by local photographer Mark Lenoce of the pier at Pacific Beach to express my holiday wishes to you: Peace on Earth and Good Will toward All!

Book #28 Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

My Review on the book's home page:

Did she write it? When did she write it? Should it have been published? Was it all just a publishing house’s grab at an icon for a new revenue stream? Did she write the first one at all?

This review of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman won’t definitively answer all the questions that have swirled since its publication, but I’ll give you my two cents worth. Though, a warning, you might not like what I have to say, regardless what side of the fence you’ve chosen to set your picket.

It seems like everyone has read To Kill a Mockingbird – becoming enamored with the wee Scout, fallen in love with Atticus, and championed Boo and Tom. The book has taken up residence in our collective experience as a rite of passage, just like Scout’s own in the story. Little negative has ever been said about the book, with its themes of social inequality and justice and courage in conviction. But then rumors began to float that a ‘sequel’ was going to be published, and the gloves came off.

Go Set a Watchman picks up Scout’s story when she is a grown woman, living in New York. She comes home for a visit and begins to suspect that her father is not the principled beacon she once thought. She catches him at a Citizen’s Council meeting, party to a racist rant from one of the other members about the state of the south in the face of the civil rights movement. Scout is devastated that the man she knew as a pantheon of fair-mindedness and justice could have slipped into darkness and racism. It’s her uncle that completes her education, schooling her in the subtleties of race relations and politics in the neo-South.

First, which came first – Watchman or Mockingbird? Reading this book like a writer, it feels like this book post-dates Mockingbird. When Scout catches Atticus at the meeting, they are in the same courthouse. Lee’s description reads like a distillation of something already written, a true memory – for Scout, and for Lee. The progression of the book’s characters support that theory for me, as well. Mockingbird is naivety and idealism distilled down to its finest form. Watchman exposes the characters’ underbellies, showing Atticus as more of a pragmatist than an idealist, even if his earlier actions could be seen as idealism by a naïf.

Next, should it have been published? There’s little doubt that the publishing house drooled a little bit when this manuscript was ‘found.’ But that doesn’t mean that the publication is a bad thing. This book is an almost necessary component to Mockingbird – the combination of the books has an affect like Gone with the Wind’s political, racial, and social commentary. Not everything is black and white – the gray is where we all live, and Scout needs that education to understand the world into which she is emerging. On the other hand, the book was not at its best technically. The first half moves a little too much like molasses in January, delaying the conflict to the point that you wonder if it will ever happen. And the writing isn’t as sharp as Mockingbird’s was, at least from what I remember from the long-ago read.

Ultimately, I’m glad I read this book and would recommend it to others, with the caveat that they read Mockingbird first. It’s hard to see our heroes vanquished only to be born again as fallible and human, but that’s a better story in the long run – a more relatable one.

Bottom Line: The death of a hero but the birth of a real man, conflicted and complicated.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #29 Finders Keepers by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

Constant Readers – the term for all us King nuts – won’t be disappointed by his continuation of Bill Hodges’ story.

Hodges was the broken hero of Mr. Mercedes, and he returns with some of the other characters from that book for a new mystery. A famously reclusive writer – think Salinger – is murdered and, along with some cash, the notebooks with his unpublished writing are stolen. The thief, though, gets locked up after secreting the loot. When he gets out of prison some decades later and wants to pick up his obsession with the writer, it turns out that another person has located the notebooks, becoming equally obsessed with them.

King is a genre bender deluxe, a shape shifter. He can write almost anything and produce quality, readable books. In fact, Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar award for best mystery. Beyond having a look at Hodges again – and he is a top notch broken and recovering hero – what’s compelling about Finders Keepers is the glimpses he gives us inside the killer’s mind – it’s realistic and truthful. King writes the bad guys really well, able to understand criminal psychology and behavior in a scary way.

Bottom Line: Psychologically complex and good Constant Reader material.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #30 Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

My Review on the book's home page:

What does Zen Buddhism have to do with writing? Natalie Goldberg asked the same question of her roshi (Zen Master). She had gravitated toward Zen mediation for self-discovery and to process the things in her life that were at loose ends. But she had a difficult time with meditation. The rosit suggested that she use writing as a Zen practice. The world opened up for Goldberg in a surprising way with the suggestion.

Writing Down the Bones is part prompt book, part philosophy, and part journal. Goldberg uses two to four pages to tackle a topic that would be important to a writer – like detail or syntax or topic. Then, she launches into an encouraging and instructive meditation on the topic. Her advice is common sense and not at all yogic, if you’re worried that you don’t want to have to grab a mat and light a candle. It’s writing and life that she wants to expose in each reader’s soul.

Among the most helpful sections were those on learning how to develop confidence and trust in the writing ability. Every writer, almost by definition, is plagued with self-doubt, but she preaches to embrace the practice of writing with regard only for what you express and what you learn about yourself in the process. Like David Morrell did, in Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft, she sees writing as a doorway to self-understanding and discovery – you only have to engage the practice.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough for anyone who is already writing or who wants to write. I gifted a copy to a writing friend this Christmas, in hopes that it would mean as much to him as it has to me. Sometimes I read a few pages as a way to get in the right mindset to write. Sometimes the section I read spoke directly to the doubts I was having that very minute. Writing Down the Bones is an invaluable resource.

Bottom Line: The writing life, and life in general, through a Zen Buddhist lens.

5 bones!!!!!


A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #31 The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

My Review on the book's home page:

Mortality descends in a whisper, engaging the memory in breaking melancholy waves. Isabel Allende’s puts us on the beach to watch the surf roll in with The Japanese Lover.

In the years leading up to World War II, Alma Belasco is forced to flee Poland as a child, leaving behind her parents and brother to live with her American uncle and aunt. Struggling to come to terms with her new family and the new world around her, she finds Ichimei Fukuda, the gardener’s son. They form a love in their adolescent years that carries them both through to old age. The story is told through Alma’s memory as she lives out her final days in a care facility.

What isn’t apparent through the first few chapters is that Allende is telling the story much as it might be encountered in Alma’s mind, in fits and starts through the haze of time and emotion. Each time Alma descends into her past, we learn more about what happened to Ichimei and her family. Though initially difficult to connect, the device serves to tell the story on another, more instinctive, level.

Herself a refugee, Allende has a rare understanding of identity that is always on display in her stories. All of her characters are desperately trying to define themselves, and eventually find that they can write their own destinies, if they allow themselves the courage to choose. Whatever may happen to them will inevitably mold them, but it doesn’t have to define them.

Bottom Line: Memory and mortality.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #32 Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor

My Review on the book's home page:

Jack London was an oyster pirate, a ‘hobo,’ a sailor, a janitor, a prospector, a fighter, and a socialist sermonizer. He outdoes Hemingway at his own game to live life in the pursuit of experience.

Earle Labor’s biography of Jack London, Jack London: An American Life is among the most well researched and detailed biographies of any person I’ve read, and easily the best exposition of a writer’s life. Labor is the curator of the Jack London Museum and Research Center and a professor of American Literature – so, he knows his subject. But the ease with which he matches London’s life with the work he produced goes a step further than mere research. He has entered the writer’s mind through the writing to provide the experiences behind the stories in a way that can’t be found in London’s correspondence or prose.

London is one of the most remarkable and interesting people, aside from his writing. He had no teachers or mentors to put him on the right track. He simply decided he was going to write and then he started reading. From his reading, he taught himself the trade and became a prolific and unique writer under his own steam. Were it not for his fractured personality and health, he could’ve secured for himself an even higher place of honor in literature.

Labor’s book is good for those who want a good historical account or for those interested in London himself. But it is also a perfect resource for those who want a glimpse into the writing process. The biography is a wonderfully instructive treatise on writing practice, composition, creativity, and the publishing world.

Bottom Line: Jack London was the epitome of an autodidact and an inspiration to everyone who scribbles.

5 bones!!!!!


A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #33 Memory and Dream by Charles deLint

My Review on the book's home page:

Isabelle Copley learns that she has the ability to usher beings into our world through her paintings. The revelation is provided by her mentor, Rushkin, a master painter who is a more artist than good person. These peculiar beings to whom Isabelle gives life begin to disappear, and Isabelle has disturbing dreams that Rushkin is feeding on them. She must choose whether to abandon her gift or let the beings make their own choices.

DeLint is known for almost single-handedly creating the sub-genre of urban fantasy. What he’s also known for is his light touch and for creating sweet, human characters to offset the evil in his stories. There’s not always a happy ending, but the stories are infused with imminently real and human characters who try to act nobly and benevolently in the face of darkness. These aren’t your typical good vs. evil fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, but are more firmly anchored in the real world. The stories exist in the periphery, just out of sight but still a part of the everyday.

Bottom Line: Urban fantasy at its best – deLint is a master.

4 bones!!!!!

Wow, some good reading there! Thanks for all those thoughtful reviews.

Have a wonderful Christmas.

Book #34 Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

My Review on the book's home page:

On the first page of Richard Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse, the narrator runs through a genealogical history, complete with clan affiliation and creation myths. It’s the kind of thing you might see in other Indian stories, either from the author, to set the stage, or from a character in the narrative to explain some idiosyncrasy. It’s the kind of thing you might hear at a native gathering, from an elder, during a prayer. It’s the kind of thing, dipped in stereotype and fermented until stale, that can bring a swift end to a read. But on the second page, Saul Indian Horse actually introduces himself when he says, “But I don’t give a shit about any of that.” Mind you, he’s not saying that he doesn’t care about his ancestry. What Indian Horse doesn’t care about is telling his story, about whether or not knowing where he comes from has anything to do with where he might be going. But he has to tell his story to get away from the treatment facility.

Saul Indian Horse’s story takes him from his ancestor’s lakes to a Catholic residential school to hockey rink’s before he begins to spiral into alcoholism. Gifted with speed and vision on the ice, Saul separates himself from life at St. Jerome’s, where the other native children suffer abuse and re-education. One priest takes a special interest in Saul, and teaches him how to play hockey. With his instinctive abilities, Saul manages to escape the school, adopted into a family and an amateur hockey league comprised completely by native communities. It’s not until Saul and his team begins to compete against white teams that he loses a grip on the game that had spirited him away. Win or lose, the white boys take hockey away from him, and take him away from his center. That’s when Saul finds himself in a bottle.

That’s not the end for Saul – he climbs out of the bottle, thanks to some visions and a treatment facility. But this is the only place the book suffers. During his revival, Saul happens on some repressed memories from the school. The twist reads like a twist – like the author had to repress those memories in Saul, and hide them from the reader, in order to protect the narrative he’d built. In looking back, there are a few subtle, extremely subtle, clues that Saul might not be a truthful narrator, and that there might be something he’s hiding. And repressed memory is a legitimate occurrence. But that condition rarely stands on its own, rarely exhibits in people, and children, who don’t exhibit other symptoms of what has happened to them. Saul,doesn’t break or act out in any other way, not until he just starts drinking one day, for no apparent reason, and then descends into full alcoholism.

Everything else about Wagamese’s book had the straight ring of truth. The writing was tight, and character driven, which is especially important in a first person narrative from such a unique character like Saul Indian Horse. The story was credible and accurate. That detail driven truthfulness extended from the sad, painful life at the residential school right down onto the hockey rink. There were long stretches where I was consumed with a game I’ve never played, watched, or cared anything about.
To be fair, the problem of Saul’s repressed memories likely won’t bother that many folks – not unless they have a background in a field that gives them a specialized knowledge. And the problem was a minor one, really, in an otherwise readable and evocative book.

Bottom Line: A fresh native voice from the cold north – even if there are a few plot points that strain some credibility, the writing is solid and filled with character.

4 bones!!!!

Book #35 Killing Floor by Lee Child

My Review on the book's home page:

Preposterous.

I’m not going to change anyone’s minds with this review. Those of you who lap at the water from this hole will come back again and again and again, no matter the toxicity levels. And I don’t think there are many who are just curious about Child’s popular hero – you’re either in already, or you don’t care. There may have been a few, like me, who enjoyed putting the brain on hold for a couple of hours for the recent film adaptation and wanted to see what the books were like – but I don’t suspect that was a very large crowd.

Abandon all intelligence, reason, and common sense, all ye who enter.

Let’s get this straight, I like a good thriller. I can even suspend some disbelief – I wouldn’t have Cussler or Koontz or F. Paul Wilson on the shelf. But at least those guys don’t try to hoodwink me into thinking that they are going to play it straight. Every time Jack Reacher talks through his murderous choices and diabolical plans for the bad guys, Child has him making it seem like there’s logic and reason to it all that, that it all jives with the real world.

Look in the card catalog under “Thrillers for Dummies.”

Look, it was readable pulp, though I wish I’d picked up one of my Spillane’s instead. It past a snowy day inside. And I’m cracking wise at this guy because he’s smurking all the way to the bank.

So, how’d it get three bones? This edition had an introduction from the author, looking back on how he started writing and how he put together this first in the series. There was some fairly thoughtful stuff there, about noodling out what you want to write about before you start writing. I just wish Child had either done better research, or thrown out the pretense that there would be anything but wild fantasy.

Bottom Line: Are you kidding me?

3 bones!!!!!

Book #36 A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

My Review on the book's home page:

Thriller and mystery authors typically don’t root themselves in the real world much. Superhuman feats are a dime-a-dozen – I remember reading about one character who did 500 push-ups and 1000 sit-ups – every morning; and another where the ‘hero’ committed countless murders while working with the police. Perhaps these stories are popular because people want to escape their mundane lives, or because they want to imagine themselves all-powerful to help face real world feelings of powerlessness. I don’t begrudge escapism or ink-and-page courage, but sometimes it can be just as empowering to read about a real person facing real problems, to identify with the feelings and choices put to someone who looks and feels ordinary, like me.

Sue Grafton has made a living with the ordinary. In A is for Alibi, she introduces us to her everyday hero Kinsey Millhone. Kindey is a woman who exercises from fear that she might have to run for her life, who eats and drinks and drives and shaves her legs, who has a landlord and bills. But above all, Kinsey is a woman who doubts herself, not in a way that paralyzes her, but in a natural and relatable way. She’s a private investigator and A is for Alibi sets the parameters for that job – insurance, slip-and-fall work that is rarely exciting. And most of the work is done either in Kinsey’s head as she thinks through details trying to find the inconsistency, or through interviewing people and evaluating who is telling the truth, who is lying, and why they’ve lied. Granted, that doesn’t sound as much fun as a running gun battle with endless ammunition and an immunity to lead. But it’s how investigators actually work. Kinsey is problem solver, constantly picking at puzzle pieces. A is for Alibi’s puzzle features a woman who was probably wrongfully convicted of poisoning her husband, and suspected of poisoning his mistress. Much like real life, the truth is more complicated.

While the mystery Grafton sets up is a bit transparent, the way she sets Kinsey up to work through the problem is classic gum-shoe. Kinsey reads the files, digs through paper, interviews people, and writes reports – not explosive but very evocative. You might solve the crime before Kinsey does, but you’ll be interested in watching her work through the miasma of conflicting stories and facts. The most compelling aspect, though, is that Grafton gives voice to Kinsey’s inner conflicts, how the investigation taps into how she views herself in the world – how we all live. Life’s events constantly get folded into internal emotion and conflict, and it’s nice to spend some time with a real person like Grafton’s everyday hero. There is a life-threatening climax and Kinsey has to use a gun to escape, but it’s not without personal consequence.

One reason that Grafton is able to shed so much light on her hero is that Kinsey is also the first-person narrator for the book. Part of the reason I picked this book up was to get an example of first person narrative, as I wanted some fresh exposure to the technique before I started writing something in that voice. Grafton wields a sharp instrument in her writing, building depth and breadth to the character with every narrative line. If Kinsey goes for a jog, there is an explanation; when and where and what Kinsey eats or drinks tells us something about her psyche; every detail, as described by Kinsey, is carefully designed to reveal. Many will toss Grafton and her books away as so much pulp, but there’s a depth her for those willing to pay attention.

Bottom Line: Grounded in everyday life, even if the mystery for this kick-off was a little predictable and not much mystery.

4 bones!!!!!

My reading year:

1. Revival by Stephen King
2. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
3. Introverts in the Church by Adam McHugh
4. Who's Irish? by Gish Jen
5. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
6. The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon
7. The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy
8. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
9. Identical by Scott Turow
10. Good Benito by Alan Lightman
11. Dies the Fire by S.M.Stirling
12. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
13. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
14. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays by T.S. Eliot
16. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
17. The World According to Garp by John Irving
18. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
19. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
20. My Antonia by Willa Cather
21. Beloved by Toni Morrison
22. Lightning People by Christopher Bollen
23. Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
24. First Blood by David Morrell
25. The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
26. Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute
27. Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
28. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
29. Finders Keepers by Stephen King
30. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
31. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
32. Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor
33. Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint
34. Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
35. Killing Floor by Lee Child
36. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
37. Drawing in the Dust by Zoe Klein

Best Fiction: The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon

Best Non-Fiction (and best writing resources): Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Book #37 Drawing in the Dust by Zoe Klein

My Review on the book's home page:

Paige Brookstone, on a sabbatical from a separate dig with her mentor, unearths the prophet Jeremiah’s bones under an Arab couple’s home. But there are another set of remains intertwined with Jeremiah’s, and the discovery unlocks the humanity that is otherwise overlooked in a Biblical prophet. The find, while fueling a religious and racial battle in an unstable Middle East, also sparks Paige’s near lost passion for archeology and love for life.

Zoe Klein’s Drawing in the Dust could be overlooked as just another faith-based story in a growing market. But Klein examines how faith is often deeply submerged in the psyche, uncovered only as the physical world’s debris is brushed away. Jeremiah, the quarry in Paige’s search, comes alive as a flesh-and-blood human as she discovers his long buried love love for a servant girl. His prophecy takes on new meaning as their story is sifted through the sands of time.

Klein’s other accomplishment, beyond giving life to Jeremiah beyond the Bible’s pages, is her construction of another narrative, written by Anatiya, the servant girl who loved Jeremiah. Anatiya’s poetic verse, as written by Klein, sings with a rare beauty, and is so consistent with its Biblical counterpart from Jeremiah that it seems to be completely real. The result is that the Biblical and fictional characters come alive with Paige’s own faith. It’s not a stereotypical and fundamental faith, but one that is born from life.

Bottom Line: Faith and religion as viewed from an ordinary perspective, in anything but an ordinary place and amid anything but ordinary circumstances.

4 bones!!!!!

Nice reviews Mac. I have read 9 of your reads this year, and I broadly agree with your reviews and ratings for #8, #12, #13, #14, #16, #18, #25 and #25 and disagree with #21, which didn't do anything for me.

Piyush!!! Great to see you here - I'm putting a link below to this year's thread:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/211102