blackdogbooks, 2013

Hello all, as promised, I will be at least posting my reviews from this year's reading. I can't promise I'll be following everyone and participating in all the discussions as I have in the previous five years. But a few of you expressed some interest in continuing to keep up with my reading for the year. Most of the folks that I usually follow, I will still follow, just not through the threads - I've marked them as friends or interesting libraries and can see when they post reviews on new books, which is what I am most interested in.

Have a good reading year!

Glad you made it over here!

So glad to see you here!

2013 Book #1, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

My Review on the book's home page:

Portia Quayne, orphaned at sixteen by the death of her mother, comes to live with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. Thomas becomes Portia’s guardian at the request of their father through a letter he penned at his death in hopes of uniting his children and the ragged pieces of his life, torn between the two very different women he loved. To this point in her young life, Portia has lived an unsettled life, traveling and living in European hotels with her mother. Thomas and Anna’s home has all of the appearance of a settled and loving environment for the girl to come of age. But Portia soon unearths Anna’s bitter jealously and Thomas’ hopeless discontent.

The heart of the novel’s title has many facets. Portia, given her sheltered and unconnected young life, has a pure and uncomplicated perspective on life. She takes people at their word, expecting they mean what they say and act accordingly. Her education at the hands of Anna, who envies her youth and beauty, and at the hands of Eddie, who is only capable of playing at love, slowly kills her innocence. The heart of Bowen’s novel is also Thomas and Anna’s marriage, which is daily dying of selfishness and anger. And Bowen also appears to be chronicling the death of the British heart in the shifting of morals and manners after the end of World War I.

Bowen is a smooth author, easily able to shift between poetic and colorful language to spare story-telling. But don’t expect an elaborately styled plot because Bowen is focused primarily on the emotions and motives of the characters.

Bottom Line: A novel about the death of innocence and the death of a moral code in Britain.

4 bones!!!!!

Great review, Mac!

I'm really glad you're still with us here on the 75, however much you participate.

>4 blackdogbooks:: That one doesn't capture my heart. However, I am planning to dig in and read Age of Innocence this year (re our conversation of last year's thread).

2013 Book #2, Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

My Review on the book's home page:

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

With apologies to any Eliot scholars, I’ve always read Prufrock as a caution against the inevitability of time and the absurdity its march leaves behind. Youth passes imperceptibly, exchanging the search for answers with routine and compromise. When you comprehend the passing, it is too late – in Eliot’s voice, the mermaids will no longer sing to you.

W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage sets out a scope of inquiry no less than the meaning of life. How do you answer the single most important question in human existence? Philip Carey, born with a club foot and orphaned at the tender age of nine, begins his search living in his Uncle William’s vicarage. The rigidly pious atmosphere quickens ideas of a spiritual life for Philip, which he pursues more deeply at a religious-based boarding school. He begins to believe that he can escape his deformity and fulfill himself in a devout life of service. Philip’s belief is so earnest and innocent that he begins to pray for miraculous healing of his club foot, taking literally Jesus’ admonition to his disciples about faith in Matthew 17:20. When Philip’s prayers go unanswered, he turns his back on God.

Philip also abandons his Uncle’s hopes of an Oxford education and travels to Germany. There, in a pastoral setting, boarding in a home with several beautiful young ladies, thoughts of beauty and love begin to bloom in Phillip. He begins to think that life is meant to be spent in the pursuit of pleasure, in experiencing the world through the senses. Philip migrates to Paris, hoping to become an artist and to tap into that sensuality which will finally give meaning to his existence and give him a place in the world. But the endless avarice of his friends and colleagues ultimately leads Philip to see only vanity in the singular pursuit of pleasure and beauty. One friend in particular, Cronshaw, tells Philip that he will find the meaning of life in a Persian rug. When Philip asks him to explain, Cronshaw gives him a rug and tells him that it will only be clear if he can learn the meaning on his own.

Near destitute now, Philip returns to London and begins a search for some way to support himself. Studying to become a doctor, like his late father, Philip meets Mildred, a waitress in a tea shop. Philip falls in love with Mildred but she never shows any interest in him beyond his money and Philip eventually spends almost all of his money trying to win her love, hoping in her love to finally find fulfillment.

Homeless and destitute, Philip goes for help to the home of a former patient, Athelny, who had befriended him. Philip marvels at Athelny’s simple life, composed of little more than a deep love and care for his family and the pursuit of only their happiness. Philip remembers Cronshaw’s advice about the hidden meaning in the Persian rug and realizes the patterns in the rug mirror the patterns in a man’s life – that life has no meaning outside the patterns built from a man’s choices. Eventually, Philip falls in love with Athelny’s daughter and decides to marry her and start a life, calculating that “the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect.”

The old boys of literature are daring – they are unafraid of facing the deep questions of human existence. And they take the exploration slowly, methodically. Modern literature rarely seems to take the same time and effort in asking and trying to answer such deep questions. Too much time is spent worrying about capturing the reader’s attention and then holding it hostage with finely tuned plots or exotic stories. But Maugham, and others like him, are more than just writers and storytellers. They are adventurers bound for uncharted waters, hoping to scratch out answers that perplex them and the readers for whom they write. Perhaps the reason so many of these classics still call to us is that their journey is so universal.

Do I agree completely with Maugham’s answer? No, but that’s not the point. The point is that he is able to explore the plight of human existence so thoroughly and offer an answer at all – that he is still able to entice the mermaids to sing to him, and that I can hear them still, too.

Bottom Line: Take the epic journey!

5 bones!!!!!


An early favorite for the year and new favorite for all time.

It isn't one of my all time favorites..I can't see ever re-reading it, for example...but I think you hit the nail on the head with your summation of what makes this book great.

Thanks, Tad. Good to see you hear. I'm still keeping up with you and your reading

2013 Book #3, The Magus by John Fowles

My Review on the book's home page:

Magic is more than deception. There is meant to be an elegance, a certain grace in the illusion that transcends mere chicanery. Nearly every boy discovers magic. That day usually comes during the same transitional adolescent period when the innocent mysticism of childhood begins to wear thin. Taking flight on the seat of a Schwin is no longer a possibility. Play-time pursuits begin to be shaped more by sport and less by imagination. Ghosts and the grotesque, slimy things under the bed are less frightening because the everyday world is more so. But then you discover that magic still exists, that, even though it is illusion, you can still conjure.

I was no different. Sometime in the awkward peak of my elementary school years, I discovered Harry Houdini and begin devouring every book about him I could find with wide-eyed gluttony. Maybe, if Houdini could fearlessly face and escape certain death, I could manage an equally daring and amazing escape from childhood with a sense of the fantastic intact. My mother, always quick to support any new creative endeavor, purchased an inexpensive magic set with a book describing a couple of card tricks and a few illusions managed with colorful plastic bits. One afternoon, I loaded them into a molded plastic briefcase, a relic of my ‘businessman’ period, and carried them to the law office where my sister worked. Each private performance, whether I fumbled the pieces or picked the wrong card, was rewarded with gleeful grins and wild applause. The attorneys grasped for that elegance and grace as a foil to the mundaneness, the loss of magic in their lives.

What does any of that have to do with John Fowles’ novel The Magus? The title suggests the connection, as it is a word that is essentially equal to magician. A quick read of the book flap offers a glimpse at the magic that the book promises – offering to pull the reader into a “saturnalian labyrinth” with “games, hallucinations, theatrical masques, riddles, and mock trials” weaving a “web of suspense and mystery.” All of that dressing, suggesting a magical journey, is rubbish. There is absolutely no magic within the pages of The Magus – there is only bald deception and vain, manipulative trickery, devoid of any of the sweet elegance of real magic.

Nicholas Urfe, a recent Oxford graduate, takes a job at an English prep school on the Greek island of Phraxos, hoping to escape an affair and find some inspiration for his life and his poetry. The school turns out to be a microcosm of the England he fled and the island outside the walls of the school is only an isolated, bucolic community of peasants – save one inhabitant, Conchis. Conchis is known among the villagers as an eccentric and is rumored to have collaborated with the Nazis during the islands occupation. Hungry for stimulation, Nicholas begins visiting Conchis’ villa. Soon, Nicholas begins to see ghosts or have hallucinations that mirror the conversations he has with his host. Eventually, he starts to believe that the things he is experiencing are an elaborate play, with actors and scripts, targeted to teach him a lesson of some sort.

And Nicholas is right. Everything he sees, all of his experiences with Conchis and the people that Conchis introduces him to, are all a big lie. When Nicholas begins to see through one layer of the play, the script twists with a new lie. You’ve probably read at least one novel that featured an unreliable narrator. The Magus is an entirely unreliable story – everyone is lying to Nichoals, all of the time. And in the end, it seems designed to destroy any idea in him that there is any unifying moral principle in the world – everything is hazard. Of course, as is common to these stories, it is suggested to Nicholas that since everything is vanity and chaos he should simply live to please himself in an honest and straightforward way – which is a unifying moral principle. Ultimately, I felt like I was reading a parable in defense of open polyamorous sexual relationships.

There was no magic, none. Every attempt at creating a mysterious or magical reality was all based in bald-faced lies and manipulative tricks. That the lies and tricks were focused on the narrator and hero of the book neither excused the device nor made the book more palatable. And the faulty circular reasoning that was meant to establish some avant garde way of life only cheapened the book further. Many of the original reviews lauded Fowles for creating such a mystical and fantastic story. But the book amounts to little more than a back-alley game of ‘Follow the Queen’ where the con man has palmed the card. Anyone can confuse and misdirect an audience if they fix the game completely – but the real magician does it with some elegance

Bottom Line: Find a different book if you’re looking for real magic.

2 bones!!!!!

I'm so sorry it was such a disappointment, but what a lovely review you've made of it! My feeling like Fowles was playing with his readers as game (instead of for the story) when I read French Lieutenant's Woman has made me hesitate away from picking up more of his work, despite the temptation. I think I still will one of these days, but I'll choose another rather than The Magus now! In any case, you're written a really wonderful review, so thanks for that, and here's hoping your next read is more satisfying!

Tanks very much. You're description of French Lieutenant's Woman doesnt give me much hope...that's exactly the way I felt about this one.

I actually enjoyed it in many ways--I felt he was toying with readers at the end of the book, but it's such a long book that it didn't come close to ruining the work for me. There are a lot of points in that one where it's really grounded in metafiction, sort of exploring what the genre is capable of. I think I might have enjoyed it more than some others in the class I was in while reading it, because I enjoy victorian novels and I enjoy writing about writing, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It just made me very aware of the possibility of him playing games in his other books, whereas I think the major game in French Lieutenant's Woman, for him, was simply trying to marry the victorian novel with contemporary expectations. There were other points in that novel where I felt he might be playing a game moreso than telling a story, but it all worked so well that I didn't mind....until the end lol. In any case, don't let me scare you away from it too much, especially if you like victorian novels...

2013 Book #4, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

My Review on the book's home page:

“Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world.” Scribbled on tear-stained paper in the bathroom closet of a train, Stingo encapsulates the desire and purpose of his book. The thought was accompanied by another, “Let your love flow out on all living things.” By the time Stingo reads these nascent thoughts, journaled while traveling back to New York to learn the fate of his friends Sophie and Nathan, he has the experience of years and life, but the conundrum of the two thoughts quickens his soul.

Young Stingo meets Sophie and Nathan in the Brooklyn boarding house where he has come to write his first novel in the years after World War II. Sophie, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and her lover, Nathan, befriend the green Southerner. Over the course of a summer, whenever the love affair between his new friends grows tempestuous, Sophie slowly confides the story of her life before the concentration camp and the events that led to her survival. As Sophie reveals more of her truth, Stingo learns more of the truth of the world and the human capacity for evil.

Published in 1979, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice was one of the first major and successful literary works to examine the evil of Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate a race of people. With a young Southern man as the narrator, Styron parallels the Jewish tragedy with the Southern slave culture. In doing so, he is able to examine the grand failure of humanity along with individual choice. The result is a view into the hearts and minds of characters in the midst of base immoral behavior. The tortured souls Styron portrays are leagues beyond any simple judgment – a Nazi doctor who chooses which new arrivals at Aushcwitz will be sent to their immediate death in the gas chambers and which will be sent to a longer death in forced labor; or the young Jewish man who hunts down collaborators and strangles them with piano wire. Nothing is easy.

Though it might be hard for a person of faith to swallow, Styron’s message is completely rooted in humanism. During Stingo’s reflection on his journal thoughts about absolute evi.e, Styron recounts the old adage, “’At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?’ And the answer, ‘Where was man?’” While a fair point, for those who would cling to their faith in the face of such evil, I would suggest Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, posits that faith is the reason many retained their hope and survived the camps, that small acts of compassion and mercy were a reflection of God, even in a place so base.

Styron’s appeal, outside of superb story-telling, is his word craft. Each page is densely jammed with long, smart sentences. Styron’s mellifluous and intelligent prose is the polar opposite of Hemingway or Steinbeck – more in the style of James, only imminently more readable, or Stegner. I can’t write this way, nor do I aspire to, but I enjoy the immersion that is required and necessarily results from reading this kind of book.

The only criticism is a personal one. Styron’s humanist point of view is supported in the book by evidence of all of the things that lift the human to the next level of adoration. There are scads of literary and musical references, and the value of the characters is colored by their appearance. So, it is no surprise that sex plays a large role in the story. Indeed, Sophie’s Choice is one of the rare recent works of literature that still stirs the soul of book-banners – the book was pulled from school shelves in Florida as recently as 10 years ago. The book shouldn’t be banned, unless you want to ban it from your house. But I found the volume of sex and coarse descriptions of sex tiring and unnecessary.

Bottom Line: Beautifully crafted examination of evil in the world.
4 1/2 bones!!!!!

Wonderfully well-written review, Mac. I have the Frankl book on my Kindle and hope to get to it soon.

Thanks, roni. Been following what you post but not your thread. The frannkl book was one that stayed with me and still does.

2013 Book #5, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

My Review on the book's home page:

James M. Cain assaults the page with the rat-a-tat rhythm of a machine gun in The Postman Always Rings Twice, exposing the weakness and corruptibility of the human soul with each new burst.

After getting thrown off a hay truck, Frank Chambers drifts into a roadside diner owned by the Greek. Frank hires on at the joint after taking one look at the owner’s wife, Cora, a molten bundle of ambition and sex. The two indulge their passion, ripping and biting each other. They hatch a plan to kill the Greek, but it’s hard to decipher who’s playing more angles.

Hard-boiled is more than a genre for this novel; it’s more of a description, as the book is reduced into a small, pungent mouthful, careening at a break-neck pace, fueled by clipped prose and punchy dialog.

Cain is only interested in the dark side. Everyone is playing an angle. That Frank ends up ruined may indicate that the novel was meant as a cautionary or morality tale. On the other hand, Cain’s reality may have been that the whole world was pulsing toward a dark end, one story at a time.

I am more of a Spillane or Hammet fan – even in their darkness, there is still a spark.

Bottom Line: Noir at its darkest.
4 bones!!!!!

Hi Mac, I loved your thoughts on Sophie's Choice. I read it when it first came out and still include it in my Top Ten personal favorites. It's funny that I don't remember all the sex in it. I suppose I was overwhelmed by the writing and powerful story. I'm also a big fan of Man's Search for Meaning. It's calling to me for a reread.

I read both The Maltese Falcon and Postman for my library book group last year. We discussed noir as a genre. Good discussion, okay books, but I'm not a big fan of that type of books...with one exception. I've heard Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone called Ozarks Noir. I loved that book!

Thanks for stopping by, Donna. I'm still following what you post on your profile. Sophie's Choice was also very powerful for me. On the noir genre, I am a much bigger fan of Spillane and Hammet. I still need to try a Chandler.

2013 Book #6, The Tears I Couldn’t Cry, Behind Convent Doors by Patricia Grueninger Beasley

My Review on the book's home page:

First, they take you to an isolated place and secure you behind locked doors, cut off from the rest of the world. Then, they take everything away from you. Even the clothes you are wearing are replaced by a drab and impersonal uniform. They cut off your hair. You are not allowed any contact with the outside world – no television, no newspapers or books, no telephone calls to your family. You are allowed one letter to a family member, confined to a solitary piece of paper, but you are warned that it will be censored if you disclose anything about how you are now living. One visit with your family on the grounds of your new home is permitted every few months, but you may not speak to them about your new life, and you may not touch them. Large portions of the day are ordered to be past in silence as you are subjected to endless hours of education about your new life, including hundreds of rules. All kinds of labor, as menial as cleaning dirt and muck from the cracks in the floor with a straight pin, is required. Meals and sleeping and moving from place to place are all conducted in the company of the other recruits and under the watchful eye of minders. There is no outlet for questions and doubt is absolutely forbidden. When all of the outside influences have been sufficiently wiped from your life, everything that makes you an individual, they begin to work on your inner life, even demanding that you banish memories that might bring you any pleasure.

I haven’t been describing a cult. I’ve been describing the experience of a postulant, a Catholic nun in training to become a member of the Order of the Sisters of Charity. These experiences were recounted by Patricia Grueninger Beasley in her book The Tears I Couldn’t Cry, Behind Convent Doors. She entered service in 1955 and spent over 22 years as a nun. To be fair, she describes the shifts in treatment and policy for nuns in service throughout her career, especially after Vatican II. Things did change for postulants over time, but it was a shock to see the level of brainwashing that occurred, as recently as 30 years ago, in the largest and most mainstream religious organization on the face of the earth.

Grueninger’s first-hand account is raw and thought-provoking. The only tiresome aspect is that she seems to cover the same ground endlessly in recounting her inner struggles with faith and doubt and obedience. Though, it is clear that, even after leaving the Order and assuming a civilian life, Grueninger has never fully come to grips with the treatment she suffered at the hands of her colleagues in faith. So, it may be that she still travels those same paths in her mind over and over again, as she did during her time with the Sisters.

Bottom Line: Eye-opening account of brainwashing in the Catholic Church.

4 bones!!!!!

Hi blackdogbooks!

I remember reading a book in my 20s called I Leap Over the Wall by Monica Baldwin about a nun who left the Church. It was an eye opener for me at the time. Around the same time I was also dating a man raise Catholic who told stories about being hit over the knuckles with the metal edge of rulers by the nuns and other physical punishments that made me shake my head in appalled amazement.

Good review.

Interestingly, a dear friend's oldest daughter became a postulant in a closed community last August at the age of 30. Friend is devastated although Catholic, daughter has apparently found the spiritual solace and lifestyle she needed.

Hi Mac

I'll stop by more often. You read some great books. Thanks for the wonderful reviews.

Glad you both checked in!

Thanks.

I've read several books by former nuns, Joan Chittester and Karen Armstrong. They all seem to have interesting stories to tell.

2013 Book #7, The Vaults by Toby Ball

My Review on the book's home page:

The Vaults lay buried in the bowels of City Hall, below the marbled halls and wood paneled offices of the city elite. Arthur Puskis shuffles through the miles of shelves, hoping to identify a pattern to the decades of criminal behavior detailed in the files there. When he discovers a duplicate file, a file designed to cover up the truth, he realizes that someone is trying to re-engineer the history and, with it, the future.

The jacket of Toby Ball’s novel, The Vaults says that if “George Orwell and Dashiell Hammet had ever decided to collaborate” the book would look like this one. But Orwell’s vision is sharper and Hammet’s understanding of the dark human heart is keener. Ball fails to deliver on any of the promised dystopian images that Orwell’s name evokes. And he also fails to deliver characters with the complexity and subtlety that Hammet wrote. Ultimately, The Vaults is a pedestrian mystery trying to work up the gumption to be noir.

Bottom Line: Pedestrian attempt at noir and a complete miss at dystopia.

2 bones!!!!!

boo... hiss...

I'm glad you liked The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain is one of my favorites, along with Jim Thompson, another noir author who rarely wrote an honest character. I must like despicable people.

2013 Book #8, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Dan Chbosky

My Review on the book's home page:

If you ask almost anyone about their high school years, they will likely tell you that they were awkward; that they weren’t in the popular crowd; that they spent most of the time hoping to escape notice; that it was among both the worst and best of all times in their lives. The universality of adolescence – its hormone-driven highs and lows; the wide-eyed, terrifying discovery of almost everything; the questions of identity; the battle between fitting-in and maintaining a rugged independence – creates an immediate commonality between Americans. Even if it is colored by the culture of a particular era or region, everyone seems to go through roughly the same things as they come of age. That’s why coming-of-age literature seems to evoke such strong, nostalgic feelings – stories like The Outsiders or A Separate Peace or It or any Judy Blume book or The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

An entirely epistolary novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows Charlie through his first year of high school. Frightened from the first day, hoping to find someone who will just listen to him a little, know him a little, understand the turmoil of emotions inside him, Charlie begins writing an unknown person. Uncompromisingly honest in his letters, Charlie is able only to dip his toes in the water in real life. He learns about drugs, sex, abuse, music, and literature from different people in his life – but only one person ever really challenges him to live.

This is not a Young Adult book – it is a book about young people struggling to find out what it means to be an adult, struggling to find their place in a confusing world. Chbosky’s decision to tell Charlie’s story through letters is a new take on the first-person perspective for coming-of-age stories, and it’s a brilliant one. The writing never feels like a technique. Chbsoky masterful assumes the language, idiom, and emotional aspect of an adolescent male, but never dumbs down the story in doing so. And while the story is told in letters, the simplicity and sparseness of the prose brings to mind classic writers. Chbosky never shortcuts the writing. Here’s an example from Charlie’s morning visit to a doctor after his first experiment with LSD:

“I just kept quiet and looked around. And I noticed things. The dots on the ceiling. Or how the blanket they gave me was rough. Or how the doctor’s face looked rubbery. Or how everything was a deafening whisper, when he said that maybe I should start seeing a psychiatrist again. It was the first time a doctor ever told that to my parents with me in the room. And his coat was so white. And I was so tired.”

I’ll admit that the setting of the book had special meaning for me – given that it was set in the early 1990’s and still had a flavor of the 1980’s, with The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Smiths. And I had a similar high-school year, befriended by a bunch of seniors at the edge of things who helped me discover who I was when I didn’t know how to go about that. These characters could have been my friends – but I bet a lot of us could say the same thing, it’s that universality.

Bottom Line: A very smart and brutally honest book about young people struggling out of their shells.

5 bones!!!!!


A Favorite for the Year.

Great review of The Perks of being a Wallflower, Mac! You really piqued my interest in that one.

2013 Book #9, I Think, Therefore Who Am I by Peter Weissman

My Review on the book's home page:

“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
-Preludes by T.S. Eliot

The struggle for identity, the search for meaning in life, is universal and timeless. What changes is the backdrop against which the journey is painted.

1967 – American youth are in revolt against the world of their parents, the generation who fought World War II and returned to prosperity and order. Whether real or a forced delusion, the naïveté of the 1950’s has eroded – sex and drug use and militant non-conformity have forced their way into the light of day. And into this vacuum of cultural and individual identity strolls Peter, ambling down the alphabet avenues in search of meaning, identity, and another dose of LSD.

Peter is the hero, or anti-hero perhaps, of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?, subtitled Memoir of a Psychedelic Year. He spends the year 1967 hanging out in various pads in New York, consuming various narcotics, and discussing the meaning of it all with his peers. While it may sound like not a lot happens, the book is driven by Peter’s obsessive, self-critical search to figure out his place in the world. That he believes dosing LSD will call down revelation and clarity seems just another symptom of a larger search among a generation set adrift by the destruction of all the conventions of identity established by the generations that preceded them.

The malaise is probably best-described by Peter’s oldest friend, Mark, as he debates about the value of tripping, “What bothers me is, what if a person changes because they get high all the time, and your friends, let’s say – and you’re your family – no longer think the way you do? You see what I mean? It’s not the different opinions that bother me – well, it’s not just that – but what if whatever connects us to the people we know disappears? What then?” The problem facing Mark and Peter and all of their friends was that, LSD or not, all of those things that had connected them up to that point in time were disappearing, were changing for all time, before their very eyes. For me, Peter’s pursuit of LSD, and a great deal of other experiences, was a journey that has been repeated millions of times over the centuries, just with different tools. Indeed, beyond drugs, Peter dabbles in Buddhism, political and social protest, religion, astrology, philosophy, communal living, love and relationships, and even in old friendships. All the time, he is searching for an identity in a world shifting under his feet. Finally, in his last bad trip, in a cold sweat, amid auditory hallucinations, Peter begins to understand his fear, not just of dying but of perishing, being wiped from the face of the earth without memory – like the lonely man who had died in the apartment he was renting, only discovered when the stench penetrated the walls.

What uncovered this book’s undertones for me was a recent reading of W. Somerset Maugham’s classic Of Human Bondage. Maugham’s hero, Philip, searches for meaning in religion, art, labor, pleasure, and relationships before finally calculating that “the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect.” Similarly, Peter, during his final bad trip, argues with himself over a life he never led but imagined, happily married and domestic with a full refrigerator and a closet stocked with blankets. The parallels between the two books, the two heroes obsessively searching for meaning and identity, were startling, especially when I learned that Weissman had never read Maugham’s book. Though set in drastically different times and cultures, both of these stories give beautiful voice to a universal experience.

Beyond the fine story-telling, Weissman’s prose is smart and melodic. He is the kind of author who can repeatedly use words that send you to the shelves for a dictionary but never make you feel like he is showing off. The vivid descriptions that break Peter’s ambling and contemplation masterfully root the account in time and place. But ultimately what makes Weissman’s account of his psychedelic year so readable is his ability to recount his tumultuous inner life with such honesty. Let’s face it, not many of us have lived that life – but all of us have experienced his doubt and his yearning.

Bottom Line: A psychedelic memoir, but really a memoir that mirrors a universal search for meaning and identity.
4 ½ bones!!!!!

Mac, I like that comparison between I Think, Therefore Who Am I and Of Human Bondage, neither of which I have read. I find that the older I get, the more satisfied I am with those things that don't cost a lot of money or sacrifice of soul. I plan to read the Maugham this year to fill in the gap of yet another unread classic.

You've convinced me to give The Perks of being a Wallflower a try, I've been avoiding it for a long while.

Donna, you should really try I Think, Therefore Who Am I also. It's a great book and the author is one of our own LT'ers here.

avatiakh, I resisted Perks for a long time but then saw the movie and fell in love with it. Since the author wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, I tried the book and found it wonderful. Hope you do, also

Book #10, Digging Deeper by Peter Weissman

My Review on the book's home page:

A rose, a lily, and sometimes a weed.

People change as they get older, assimilate experience in light of numerous factors and in accordance with a kernel of character that eventually flowers into something recognizable: a rose, a lily, and sometimes a weed.

Digging Deeper is the continuation of a journey begun in the psychedelic memoir I Think, Therefore Who Am I?. Peter, the narrator of the memoir, describes this process of change while taking a close look at his wife. But his razor-sharp, critical mind was most likely cutting into his own psyche more than anyone else’s. At that moment, which of the three represented you, Peter – the rose, the lily, or the weed?

At the end of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?, Peter has survived one last bad trip, complete with cold sweat, auditory hallucinations, and a fairly severe case of paranoia. With the experience, Peter confronts an abiding and overwhelming fear of being wiped from the face of the earth in anonymity. As we join him again in Digging Deeper, he is living in virtually the exact void he feared: commuting on a train with vacant-faced, lost souls; working in an anonymous building, in an anonymous cubicle; hiding behind a newspaper for fear that he will be forced to speak to someone.

What changes his life is Noreen – a woman he spent a couple of days with months before, helping her through her own bad acid trip. Noreen sends Peter a letter, begging for his help, begging him to let her visit him. When she does, she invites herself into his apartment and into his life. Peter realizes what a powerful thing it is to be needed, and he surrenders to everything that comes with the revelation. Living again, if not purposefully at least more actively, working as a mail carrier to support Noreen and her art, Peter longs to abandon everything in pursuit of writing. But the longing can’t overcome his fear of what such a choice will mean about who he is – in the early stages of his writing, he can’t even commit to more than just one page in a sitting, asking himself later, Because I was self-conscious about seriously considering myself a writer?

Things finally come to a head while the couple is living with Noreen’s parents in a servant’s cottage, Peter maintaining the grounds in exchange for room and board. The two bring a dog home from the pound and, in addition to his other duties, Peter is left to raise, care for, and chase after the mutt. Peter finally confronts Noreen about the inequalities of their marriage, Peter always providing and giving – Noreen always expecting and taking. At the climax of the argument, Noreen slaps Peter and tells him that he is making his own choices in life. Peter retrieves the glasses she’s knocked from his face and, finally making a choice for himself, leaves Noreen.

The introspective self-loathing and doubt of I Think, Therefore Who Am I? is still here in Weissman’s follow-up, but with a twist. Even in the midst of his meandering, go-with-the-flow life, he is testing, beginning to engage those bits of himself he wants to give voice, beginning to be a more willful participant than just a bystander sometimes caught up with the events around him. In some ways, taking Noreen in, even though it later became a fairly co-dependent relationship, was the first step towards living instead of experiencing. More examples of that type of behavior are revealed in his jab as a mail carrier. For example, Peter warns several people on his route that their mail is being monitored by unknown government forces. Later, he intercepts religious come-ons targeting the elderly and soft-minded for donations. He takes them home and burns them in his fireplace at home. These choices connect Peter to the world around him as a participant rather than as an observer who simply reacts.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of Weissman’s memoirs is how personal they are. Aren’t all memoirs necessarily personal? Well, no. Many are regurgitations of facts and events, set down on paper to cement the subject’s place in history or some other similarly selfish goal. But Weissman’s narrative is deeply personal and internally driven, more of a meditation on himself and his place in the world than an account of his life. After several chapters, you feel like you’ve been sitting on a porch, sharing a beer, and listening to him ruminate about his life.

Of course, nothing in Digging Deeper is more personal than Peter’s struggle to write. At one point, about to critique a friend’s work, he writes, When you present your work, it’s like baring your persona to critical inspection. For Peter, the writing is his persona – and both are equally on display for criticism. It’s a courageous choice. But that’s the one piece of advice Peter remembers and recounts from a writing group he attended, But why fear the images our minds create? … It’s no excuse. We have to let the images penetrate, to batter us – if it comes to that. Anything else is cowardly.

Digging Deeper is a smoother book, both in the writing and in the narrative. Weissman has grown considerably as a writer by the time this book is published. The writing is as intelligent and edgy as I Think, Therefore Who Am I? but it is more polished. There is less trouble deciphering what Peter is grappling with and where he is going. But these changes in the book likely echo changes in the man. He has grown up. Not the growing up of compromise but of refinement in thought and character. In Peter’s words, There is such a thing as growing up; a notion I’d resisted for years. Of accepting responsibility and doing things you wouldn’t choose to if you had a choice. But disclaim whatever it is that sparks youthful enthusiasm and you lsoe something essential. I spoke to the teenager that evening and the man he’d become, and was relieved.

Peter flowers alright. After leaving Noreen, he meets her again at a play written by a mutual friend. He has an inclination to sprint across the street and run away, an inclination that he follows several times in I Think, Therefore Who Am I?. But this time, he stands his ground and speaks his mind, telling her how she had mistreated him and abused his good-naturedness all those years. I’m still not sure what Peter would say at this moment in his life about whether he was the rose, the lily, or the weed – but I’m sure he would’ve felt the roots seeking further depths in the earth beneath him.

Bottom Line: A deeply personal and courageous memoir.

5 bones!!!!!

Wow, what a review, Mac!

Thanks, roni. About halfway through Territory

I hope you are enjoying it!! *anxiously biting nails*

Book #11, Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times

My Review on the book's home page:

This little book collects over a couple dozen essays that were published in the New York Times on the subject of writing. Given the diversity of the authors and their perspectives on writing and the writing life, there is obviously something here for everyone. I was exposed to writers I’d never heard of, and have started collecting their books up to read. I was surprised by authors whom I have read for years, learning a great deal more about their process and their belief about writing. And there were some essays that didn’t do anything at all for me, from authors whom I don’t like and still don’t. What I’m going to do is feature several of the essays that really moved me.

Russell Banks, A Novelist’s Vivid Memory Spins Fiction of Its Own
Banks recounts a reading he did in Boston near where he worked in a book store before being published. It turns out that the way he remembered that time of his life wasn’t how others remembered it. But it also turned out that it didn’t really matter, because he’d used the events of his life as fodder for his writing, and that the process had been, well, therapeutic. My favorite thing from the essay, an old crook that Banks used to hang out with told him, “Artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.”

Saul Bellow, Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters
Bellow thinks that there is very little that will harm the world of printed literature, the permanence of good books and good writing will sustain any attack. I’m not a big Bellow fan but I really appreciated his encouragement to budding writers and his certainty that there was a wealth of good writing that just doesn’t get the appropriate attention.

Ann Bernays, Pupils Glimpse an Idea, Teacher Gets a Gold Star
Bernays offers a few writing drills that she used for her students. And she maintains that a good writer is always thinking like a writer, in every moment of the day, evaluating the events and people around them for material.

Rosellen Brown, Character’s Weaknesses Build Fiction’s Strengths
Rosellen Brown argues that she finds thorny or rakish characters interesting and tries to model those personalities in her writing. She was disgusted by the idea that readers would quit on a book or assail it after finishing because a character was unlikable. Brown’s only concern for such characters is whether their actions are plausible or represent some reality that is recognizable to the reader. I disagree with Brown – not because I want to lose myself in a fantasy where everyone is likable or where everything turns out butterflies and puppy dogs in the end but because there has to either be balance or growth. I’m not picky, one or the other will do. I disagreed with her but her essay was provocative.

Richard Ford, Goofing Off While the Muse Recharges
Sometimes a break from writing, the actual physical act of it, can recharge and provide inspiration. Writing can consume to the point that you forget to participate in the world.

Kent Haruf, To See Your Story Clearly, Start Pulling the Wool over Your Own Eyes
Haruf is a favorite writer of mine. This was one of those revealing essays. Haruf’s point here was to get a rough, first draft down without critique. Don’t let the internal editor overcome your instincts in your writing. But what I learned is that Haruf takes this to the extreme, pulling a knit cap over his eyes when he writes his first draft – he actually doesn’t read what he writes the first time through. I would love to be a fly on the wall for that process.

Alice Hoffman, Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life’s Facts
I’ve always been reluctant to buy a Hoffman book – standing at the counter under the scrutiny of the cashier as I purchased an emotional, touchy-feely chick-lit book. But Hoffman’s essay made me re-consider that. She, like Banks, believes in the therapeutic power of writing, working through all of the things boiling around in your head through stories and characters. Hoffman worked through cancer with her writing.

Gish Jen, Inventing Life Steals Time, Living Life Begs It Back
At one point, Jen decides that she is missing too much of her life with all of the demands writing puts on her life, so she decides to quit. But in the days of her life after she quits, she starts to see things that she wants to write about. She realizes that a writer can’t really separate that part of her life from everything else.

Hans Koning, Summoning the Mystery and Tragedy, but in a Subterranean Way
Good, or serious writing, as Koning calls it, deals with a deep examination of the human condition. “It means to me that if you want to write a serious novel, you should not only be out to entertain but you should also, in a hidden way, reflect on the world’s justice and injustice, hope and illusion.”

Walter Mosley, For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day
I read a book Mosley wrote about writing. I didn’t care for it much, as it was more like a check-list of all the things you need to get a book written and published. There was very little insight to the writing process and writing life. But this essay had all of the things that the book didn’t. Mostly, Mosely encouraged the daily writing routine, nourishing those instincts and ideas every day with a little bit of participation. The essay was both encouragement and conviction.

Scott Turow, An Odyssey That Started with Ulysses
This was the most surprising essay in the collection, giving me a new found respect and love for a favorite author of mine. Until I read this essay, I’d always thought of Turow as more of a genre writer. But Turows struggle to find the voice for his art revealed unbelievable depths to his thought process. Turow is a reader’s writer, and his belief that mystery stories provide a beautiful springboard for examining the human condition was eye-opening.

Elie Weisel, A Sacred Magic Can Elevate the Storyteller
I loved this essay because everything Weisel writes feels like a prayer, which, not surprisingly, is his purpose.

Hilma Wolitzer, Embarking Together on Solitary Journeys
Wolitzer, who came to writing early but to publication late, writes eloquently about the real commitment needed to write. She also examines the dynamics of a critique group. The essay combined the larger aspects of the writing life with solid practical advice.

5 bones!!!!!

Territory?

Soon, Roni

#38 - 5 bones always gets my attention, Mac! You've given me just enough detail about Writers on Writing to make me want to read more.

good, it's a great read and resource, porch

Apologioes to Roni, who recommended the book. I hope the review below show that I was conflicted about how to rate the book. It's good but it didn't meet the expectations I had, and they weren't because of Roni's comments but because of the book's premise.

Book #12, Territory by Emma Bull

My Review on the book's home page:

The best Western ever written, and I won’t suffer arguments here, is The Virginian. That book defined the very genre of modern Western writing. There had been a lot of dime-novels written over the years, but none had ever attempted to push the genre into the world of literature before Owen Wister. Emma Bull’s Territory attempts the same kind of push forward for the genre, mixing elements of science fiction and fantasy in with the story of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in boom-town Tombstone. Surprisingly, Bull, who is better known for her urban fantasy, ends up writing a better Western than a science fiction story.

The book is set in Tombstone, a few weeks before the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral. A stranger walks into town in search of his stolen horse that arrived ahead of him, ridden by an outlaw carrying a few ounces too many lead in him. Okay, check – stranger rolls into town, and check – early gunplay with a bad guy on the receiving end. The stranger settles into town and falls for a local widow who works at one of the town newspapers. Good, check – unusually strong, if lonely, woman. Soon, the stranger is digging into the intrigue surrounding the Earps and the Clantons. Great, check –warring factions of sun and dust-hardened cowboys. About half-way through the book, several of the cowboys are unveiled as sorcerers.

Earp and Holliday and the Clantons are archetypes that make for fascinating storytelling and Bull takes full advantage of their legend without relying too heavily on it. Her deeper examination of Holliday’s internal life and struggles is a rare thing, as most writers and historians focus on his cold hardness. But it would be a mistake to overlook what must have been Greek-like obstacles to living. That he was deeply conflicted about himself rings true. And Bull’s authentic portrayal of the gray circumstances of some of the Old West’s famous gun battles raises the narrative out of the genre.

The biggest problem with the book is that, outside of a few rather confusing glimpses, the supernatural aspects of the book aren’t unveiled until well into the story. Bull drops crumbs here and there, but they aren’t clear enough or intriguing enough to overcome the interest in the Western and the strong characters she’s created. Ultimately, the book is just frustrating, requiring re-reads of pages and paragraphs to decipher elements that should be hitting us over the head. So many of the supernatural aspects of the story seem to happen off-page or they happen in a way that leaves you scratching your head about who was the perpetrator and how he or she pulled it off. I like the idea of gunslingers as sorcerers, but the idea never really gets the stage.

Perhaps, Bull was trying to ease her way into this genre-mash without offending Western readers, but she ends up with a pretty good Western and a lack-luster science fiction book. She would have been better off going for the whole enchilada without any reservations.

Bottom Line: A unique Western that doesn’t deliver on the science fiction/fantasy promise it makes.

3 bones!!!!!

Perhaps because I regarded it as fantasy elements--almost more magical realism-- rather than science fiction, I liked it better than you, Mac. But what I really enjoyed, character-based junkie that I am, is what you liked, her strong characters. I'm glad you enjoyed that aspect of the book.

Good review! I enjoyed the sf/fantasy aspects more than you did, but agree that the characters are what make this book. This was the first real attempt to marry a Western with sf/fantasy that preserves the Western nature. Most I've read weigh too heavily into the fantasy, so the Western side becomes setting instead of spirit.

Thanks, doc and roni.

Book #13, Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

My Review on the book's home page:

Young Adult fiction – I don’t even like the term. In the last decade, bookstores have swelled with novels that were written for and marketed to – and even sometimes written by – a narrow age range of people, let’s say pre-adolescent to early-high school aged. Championed by glittery, angst-ridden vampires and bow-and-arrow toting teen gladiators, I firmly believe that the phenomenon was largely created by publishing house marketing departments who saw more dollar signs than they did good writing. Just twenty or thirty years ago, anyone in that age range would have been reading Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc. And they would have done so without any thought about whether the book was meant for a person of a particular age or not. I’ve heard teachers and parents excoriate the electronic age because they think they can’t get their children to read anything more than 140 characters at a time. So, they push fantastic, and largely dumbed down, tales that they know will soon be featured on a towering screen down at the multi-plex, where the biggest moral issue will be whether the hunky werewolf or the foppish vampire gets the girl.

Into this world of watered down writing comes Kenneth Oppel’s new novel – the first in a trilogy probably because three movies based on three books is a franchise – Airborn. Oppel himself was a fledging writer in his Young Adult life, having his story Coolin’s Fantastic Video Adventure published after it made its way to Roald Dahl. So, it’s no surprise that Airborn is a work firmly entrenched in the Young Adult world with a teen hero and ingénue trying to world and save the world when all of the adults seem to be acting stuidly.

Airborn follows the adventures of Matt Cruse, a cabin boy on an airship – think Hindenburg. In this semi-dystopian alternate history, most travel is conducted on airships that are kept aloft by hydrium, a gaseous element lighter than hydrogen. Matt’s father was a sailmaker – the person an airship who monitors the containers of hydrium and patches the skin of the airship – when he fell into the ocean. The captain makes Matt a cabin boy to help him feed his family back home and to give him his father’s trade. On a routine cruise to Australia, Matt befriends Kate DeVries, who is on board hoping to find an island where her adventuring grandfather once spotted a flying cat creature. Soon, into the trip they are attacked by pirates who damage the airship, forcing it to make an emergency landing on an uncharted island. Matt and Kate make an amazing scientific discovery on the island and defeat the pirates without any adult help whatsoever.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a little swash-buckling, otherworldly adventure, whether on the open sea or in the air. But Robert Louis Stevenson and H.P. Lovecraft and Patrick O’Brian have written these stories already, and they did so without any need to dumb down the prose or simplify the story. To be fair, Oppel has the beginnings of an intriguing story, but in targeting a particular reading age, the writing isn’t challenging in any way and the story is predictable, things that can never be said of Stevenson, Lovecraft, O’Brian, and a host of other great writers. Airborn wasn’t a bad book – it kept my interest. But it wasn’t that good either. That seems to be what Young Adult fiction often shoots for.

What’s even more troubling is that the back of the book has a list of awards the book has won. Is this really the best we have to offer our kids? Are we dumbing them down by offering them dumbed down reading options? The answer to the first question is a resounding, “No.” Sadly, I don’t know how to answer the second question. I’m happy to see an explosion of reading interest, even if it is misogynistic love triangles between humans, werewolves, and vampires or teenagers killing each other in an arena spectator sport. But I hope that there is as much enthusiasm for youngsters fighting looters in caves and traveling down-river aboard a raft, because these stories were much smarter and challenged readers of all ages to face bigger issues than who gets the girl.

Bottom Line: Young adult fiction aboard a Hindenburg-like airship – the young adult part tells you pretty much all you need to know.

3 bones!!!!!

Hi Mac- Great review of Territory. Sounds like an interesting misfire. I have never read the Virginian, so at least I can add that one to the WL. Have you read Doc yet?

Hey buddy! Nope, I haven't searched out Doc yet, but I am on the prowl for a copy.

See, if you lived closer I would just lend you my copy. It is such an excellent book and I heard Russell is currently working on a follow-up, which is exciting news.

>43 blackdogbooks:: I enjoyed Territory a bit more than you did, I think. However, my main problem with it is that it didn't feel finished at all. Yet, we're six years down the road and I don't see any sign of a sequel.

Book #14, The Hero’s Walk by Anita Rau Badami

My Review on the book's home page:

Heroes are hard to find – though perhaps because we are always looking in the wrong places. Silently noble folks who daily exhibit the heroic in small things are everywhere – we just rarely recognize or acknowledge them.

Sripathi lives in a small village in India. His house, a large one by the standards of the village, is crowded to bursting with his wife, his adult son, his aging mother, and his spinster sister. He spends mornings writing anonymous letters to the editor of the newspaper and stewing his lot in life. His daughter, Maya, left years before to attend college in Canada. Sripathi has refused to speak of her since she shamed the family by refusing to enter into a marriage that her parents had arranged for her. Sripathi’s life changes with a telephone call informing him that Maya and her husband have died in a car accident, leaving behind a daughter, Nadana. Sripathi travels to Canada and brings the child back to India.

The story is a simple one, following the lives of Sripathi and his family as they grieve their loss and try to adjust to Nandana. But the simplicity of the story belies the complexity of emotion in the characters.

The title of the book originates with a traditional Indian dance, which tells the mythological story of Rama and Ravana, two great kings who battle. Sripathi’s wife, Nirmala, teaches dance in the village and explains one day to her students that they must “walk with dignity … walk with courage and humility” during the dance to capture the characters and tell the story. The dance is a symbol of the daily walk of each of the characters as they maneuver the difficult choices in life. Their simple lives, though not the stuff of heroic stories, echo the dance, walking with courage, dignity, and humility. While they each mourn their status in some way, they still conduct themselves nobly and heroically. They are heroes whether they themselves or anyone else recognize them as such.

I’m increasingly a fan of modern Indian literature, as there are several talented and thoughtful writers pushing out unique stories from this culture. Anita Rau Badami deserves more recognition than she has received. She is a lyric wordsmith and a creative storyteller. And this story, while firmly rooted in Indian culture, has much to say about the human condition in any culture.

Bottom Line: A beautifully written story about everyday heroes – firmly rooted in the Indian culture but indicative of the human condition in any culture.

4 bones!!!!

Book #15, So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger

My Review on the book's home page:

For his second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Leif Enger chose one of the oldest and most hallowed tropes – the road trip. As far back as The Canterbury Tales or The Odyssey, quests have been used as a metaphor for life, perhaps because the metaphor quickens within us all the desire to strike out and change ourselves.

In So Brave, Young, and Handsome Monte Beckett is stuck. After writing a wildly successful western adventure, he can no longer find the words or the story. He sits on the porch, scribbling unpublishable tripe and burning the pages. The porch affords him a view of the river, constantly moving and alive – a vital reminder of how stagnant he has become. Then, the river produces his salvation, a strange, spritely man rowing through the mist, mumbling and laughing to himself. Glendon Hale – which might be his real name or might be another in a long line of aliases designed to help elude a violent and vulgar past – breathes new life into Monte. Glen convinces Monte to leave with accompany him on a journey to Mexico to find a long lost love. The trip transforms the two men.

Early in the novel, a lawman chastises Monte that authors make the world too much of a romance. Monte takes exception to the argument, declaring, “violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.” This notion is one that Monte must recapture in his journey, as his life has become too much of a a forced march – he has lost the ability to see the romance in the world around him and, with that loss, the ability to live life instead of work at it. Not until Monte has regained the romance of the world is he able to write again.

What thrums with life in the novel is also its greatest weakness. The eccentric and quirky cast of characters Monte encounters on his journey is fascinating but by the time we get to the Annie Oakley shooting girl and the midget horse salesman, the circus has one too many clowns. Enger reaches too far to make these minor characters colorful when the real interest is in the main characters; the ones whose angst looks a little more like our own. Monte – a tragic figure, stagnant and moored too firmly by his fears of failure – and Glen – the drunk trying to recapture his past in the same breath as absolution for it – are the real interest. Or Monte’s wife, holding her family together delicately, like grasping at a group of eggs just larger than her hands. These are the truly provocative characters in the novel and they are featured far too little while Enger chases the quirky.

The best example of Enger’s misguided path is Charlie Siringo. Just as Monte and Glen’s journey has begun, they are separated and Monte is left in the custody of Charlie Siringo, a retired Pinkerton who cannot quit his prey. Perhaps because Siringo was a real and terribly interesting person, Enger seems devoted to creating some space to tell the man’s story. Sirigno, both in the novel and in real life, went undercover to infiltrate Butch Cassidy’s gang during its train-robbing phase. A renowned lawman, for his exploits and the books that he wrote about them, Siringo cast a more professional and intellectual shadow than the gunslingers of the time. But with Siringo, Enger’s novel goes off the rails. While Siringo pursues Glen with Monte in custody, Enger loses sight of the tone and character of his story. Almost immediately, the description of place and time falls by the wayside. Traveling over the Kansas flatlands and into the Oklahoma hills with Monte and Glen, the country is vivid and alive, bounding off the page. But Siringo carries the story into a void that is bland and featureless, opaque to everything but Siringo’s own narrative. And some of Monte’s most uncharacteristic and unbelievable moments are with Siringo. The lengths that Enger goes in keeping Monte in Siringo’s custody strain the bounds of believability. Even Monte, a fearful and stagnant man, should have been able to elude a man who is suffering the ill effects of age, gunshot wounds, and the onset of a paralyzing stroke.

Enger is clearly setting Siringo up as the anti-thesis of Glen and Monte’s pursuit of change and growth – as Siringo stands for all things unchanging. He is unable to lay down his obsession, ceaselessly chasing glory in the same way over and over again. But this is a comparison that would have been best suited to tell from afar. Remember that scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – the two outlaws perched on rocky crag, peering out over the reflective desert sand at the ever plume dust kicked up by their dogged pursuers. “Who are those guys?” Butch says. Siringo from afar, obsessed and persistent, would have made the same point across without derailing Monte and Glen’s story.

Bottom Line: A transformative quest tale – derailed in the middle but set aright in the end.
My Review on the book's home page:

3 bones!!!!!

Book #16, Before and After by Rosellen Brown

My Review on the book's home page:

“Screw what really happened! What’s it going to take for you to get this? ‘The truth’ in a courtroom is just a construction of effects. It’s theater. There is no such thing as simple truth, as long as its presentation can be shaped, or perverted, or invented, even. Not the facts, mind you. I’m talking presentation. Either side can skew the way things appear, and how they appear is all that matters.”

Before and After, by Rosellen Brown, is not about what really happened. But life is rarely about what really happened. What really happened, the event that creates the plot of the book, is in doubt until the closing section of the book. What Brown focuses on throughout the story is how everyone is affected – the lives of the characters Before and After.

Rosellen Brown captures this transformation vividly through the eyes of three people – the mother, father, and sister of an accused murderer, Jacob, an otherwise typically rebellious and angry American teenager. Carolyn, Jacob’s mother and a doctor in their small town, is the first to feel the ugly caress of violence when she is summoned to the Emergency Room to attend the body of a teen-aged girl who was brutally and fatally beaten. The girls head is caved in and her, her sad, lifeless body is laid out on a gurney. There are few things more offensive than the view of a human body so recently departed of its quickening force, its soul, if you believe in such a thing. No matter the severity of the wounds – they can be gruesome or invisible altogether – there is a shameful absurdity in looking at what was recently a breathing, thinking, and feeling human and is now nothing more than a sack of meat. Carolyn, without knowing about Jacob’s involvement, views the victim’s body and detaches herself from the emotion of it, a luxury she soon loses. Jacob’s father, Ben, a sculptor and angry man himself, next feels the transformative genius of violence, finding in the trunk of Jacob’s car a jack covered in blood and hair. Ben embraces the emotion of the discovery, protecting Jacob, who he assumes is guilty, by hiding and destroying the evidence. Finally, Judith, Jacob’s younger sister, an almost forgotten casualty of the crime, realizes that the behavior she found frightening in her brother might be the tip of a much more disturbing iceberg.

Superman, one of America’s oldest and most iconic superheroes, fights for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” That belief in a satisfying and rehabilitative closure in seeing bad men brought law in justice, while appealing, is a whole-cloth myth. The courts are full to bursting with the wronged and the evil, the innocent and the culpable. What so few people understand is that there is little justice and even less truth once you push through the over-sized wooden doors of a courtroom. What resides there is made up of what people can be made to believe, what people are willing to believe, or what people want to believe – not what can be proven. What does it matter if proof exists but no one can be convinced of its validity and worth?

This construct, the very bedrock of our system of justice, bleeds into everyday life. Victims and accused find that their lives outside those cruel doors have the same surreal quality. Family, life-long friends, casual acquaintances, and even strangers treat them differently, whether they are the ones who suffered the crime or are accused of committing it – they are perceived differently by everyone once they are caught in the net of violence. Perception has shifted, in their minds and all around them. And it will never retrieve the same angle as it had before.

What makes Brown’s examination of this transformation in Jacob’s family so evocative is that she writes about it from their own personal perspective rather than from a neutral, all-knowing narrator’s perspective. Carolyn views the events through her detached and impersonal doctor’s eyes, and her narrative is the coldest, but appropriately so. Ben, immediately awash in every emotion that surfaces, is the most vital, and Brown tells it from the first-person, as though Ben was sitting next to you, relaying the events of a few hours or minutes past. And Judith, tells her story almost as she might in a diary, chronicling the personal events of her days as she sees them, forgotten by her family and left to process everything without the necessary experience that a few more years of life would give her.

Bottom Line: A realistic and personal look at the loss of innocence at the hands of justice – much more provocative than a mystery for its perspective.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!

Great review of Before and After, Mac! You've definitely made me want to read it.

Thanks, tymfos. Worth the time.

#17, The Passage by Justin Cronin

My Review on the book's home page:

The Passage, the first in a series of books by Justin Cronin, is one of those epic and sprawling stories that is a comfort to settle into; one that seems like it may never finish, may go on and on and never cause you to be tired of it. It is a book where the author seems to have settled in with you, taken time to flesh everything out, follow every rabbit trail, describe every sense and every emotion in every setting. The spell allows a reader to completely forget the outside world and step into another, making friends of the characters, tasting and smelling and feeling what they do. But few authors are capable of casting that spell; and even fewer editors or book publishing houses are apt to allow an author to conjure such a spell, shooting instead for the comfort that comes of predictability and reading bytes – or bites, either word fits here.

The Passage starts with a virus discovered in the deep reaches of a tropical jungle by a scientist. The set-up sounds like any number of other thriller books or movies that have been churned out since 1980. But Cronin distinguishes himself and his story by taking the time to tell a whole story, instead of just writing one of those books that seems like the jacket copy or screenplay was written first and then sent to some hack to fill in. The scientist, James Lear, is distraught from the recent death of his wife from cancer and he hopes to cure the disease and any other that could take a loved one away before their time. He enlists the help of the military, always a sign of trouble to come. But again, Cronin distinguishes his story in the details, focusing on another lost soul, FBI Special Agent Wolgast, who is asked to convince 12 death row inmates to be the first test subjects of the virus. Wolgast’s pain and hopelessness ooze off the page. After Wolgast has succeeded, he is then asked to bring Amy, a six year old girl abandoned by her mother at a convent, to the secret Colorado complex where the virus is being tested. Soon after Wolgast arrives with Amy, the experiment goes awry, as was its destiny, and all 13 test subjects are released into the world. The world collapses into chaos, destruction, and death – the test subjects feeding on and infecting the rest of the country.

This by itself was a full book, a complete story, if a little dark and unhappy. But for Cronin, the first 300 pages was just the epilogue. For the next 600 pages tell the story of the world that emerged from the chaos and destruction – a small compound of about 100 souls, protected each night from the ‘virals’ by walls and nets and lights, exiting outside of time and outside of any hope that life has continued elsewhere. Peter Jaxson, one of the young men of the compound, encounters Amy on a patrol outside the walls. Amy, now a 100 year old adolescent, follows Peter back to the village, and the ‘virals’ follow her. Peter and his friends let Amy into their world but death follows her, and the small civilization is again thrown into chaos. Peter and his friends discover some of what Amy is and decide to leave their safe haven for the site of Amy’s quickening, Colorado. On their journey, they discover that other pockets of human life have survived, though not all are hospitable.

None of this description of the Cronin’s story does it any justice, as the real beauty is in the unhurried and indulgent manner in which Cronin tells the story. Few authors take their time this way – recently, I’ve read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and there is any number of Stephen King books, including The Stand, which Cronin’s book is often compared. If there is a comparison between King’s The Stand and Cronin’s The Passage, it has to exist on a level besides the obvious – a virus causes the country to collapse and a new dystopian way of life emerges. It has to exist in comparing these author’s inclination to take their time, to draw the story out and tell all of it, every detail. No one will begrudge Cronin’s descriptions of place and time and feeling once they’ve given the story a hearing. And no one will begrudge him the time and effort in examining every detail of each character’s life, because they all are us – they are all the people we recognize in our lives every day.

Bottom Line: Epic story-telling – unhurried and indulgent in a way that comforts the reader, transports them to another place to commune.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!



I am definitely looking forward to the continuation of this story The Twelve and beyone. Highly recommended.

Book #18, Joyland by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

The rare author can create brief moments of sentimental nostalgia that aren’t sickeningly saccharine. But the author who can immerse you in a time and place that seems familiar, that connects you to your own past without losing the truth and pain of the time, is a master. Sherwood Anderson was able to cast that spell in Winesburg, Ohio and Ray Bradbury cast the same spell repeatedly in his career with Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, to name just a couple. Stephen King has managed the feat so many times in his stories that we have begun to expect it when we pick up a book. Anyone who has read “The Body” in Different Seasons or It or 11/22/63 knows. Those stories orient the reader to a specific time and place, but also to long past feelings in their own lives, in a way that bring memories down like a cool summer rain. Joyland, King’s newest, rains hard and sweet.

Devin Jones is at sea, having experienced and lost his first love in his first year of college. He takes a job at Joyland, a small-town carnival in North Carolina. Devin learns that a ghost haunts one of the rides, trapped in the dark after a brutal murder.

To say more about the plot of the book is not necessary, as the real meat of the story is Devin’s journey into manhood – his becoming. He mourns the loss of love and learns what it means to live fully, connected to everything and everyone around him rather than obsessed with one person or one feeling. He learns that love takes many forms and can be found in many places – a revelation sets his course for life.

One of the beauties of King’s writing is his uncanny ability to tap into human emotion in a simple and straightforward way. He drops thoughts onto the page that cut deep. Let me show you – this one is Devin processing the loss of his first love through a 60 year old mind, one that should be able to work through the idea that his loss likely had little to do with him. But his inner demons won’t let him make that leap.

“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me. What was I lacking. I’m in my sixties now, my hair is gray and I’m a prostate cancer survivor, but I still want to know why I wasn’t good enough for Wendy Keegan.”

Through the story, Devin learns a lot about himself, but he never learns enough to completely work through the loss. Do any of us? Isn’t that why looking back at our younger selves is so bittersweet? 60-year-old Devin says as much:

“When you’re twenty-one, life is a road map. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.”

“That room was where I sat up some nights with my stereo turned down low, playing Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, having those occasional thoughts of suicide. They were sophomoric rather than serious, just the fantasies of an over-imaginative young man with a heart condition … or so I tell myself now, all the years later, but who really knows? When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

There are other little nuggets, like when Devin recounts a dinner with his father where the old man never says anything about the absence of his son’s girlfriend. “I’m not sure men know how to talk about women in any meaningful way.” Or when a character expresses confusion about religion, “I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world. Religion is supposed to comfort.”

What’s powerful about all of this insight, as well as the rest of the story, is the simplicity that King uses to recount it all. King is often criticized as pulp writer, writing in genres that are meant only to entertain and doing so in an artless way. But art doesn’t have to be complicated – sometimes the simple is more artful for its bareness.

Bottom Line: Artfully simple and nostalgic story – I dare you to read this and not be carried back to your own past.

5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year – duh!

Thumbs up on that review! It's been years since I've picked up King even though I like him, and he's good at writing those passages of human events most of us have experienced. This one needs to be on the WL, and the cover art is great too.

Thanks, ms!

Great reviews, and I especially appreciate the one of Joyland. I'll definitely have to read that one!

Hi Mac- I loved your review of The Passage. We had very similar feelings about that one. The only unfortunate thing is, I was very disappointed in the Passage.
I just skimmed your review of Joyland but did notice the 5 bones. I have this one saved on audio and hope to get to it soon. You might want to start looking into Wool. I really liked that one and think you would too.

Thanks, tymfos and msf.

I'll look out for Wool. Sounds interesting.

Mac, you've made the latest King impossible to resist. You also included some great quotes. Onto the wishlist it goes. Thanks for another thoughtful review.

Wow, everyone's showing up. Thanks, Donna!

Mac - I loved the quotes you shared from Joyland, but I enjoyed your turns of phrase just as much. if Joyland does indeed "rain hard and sweet," then onto the TBR list it goes. Thanks for the great review!

Wooo, look at all the activity here. And more great reviews are drawing them in, Mac!

Thanks, guys. nice to see y'all

Late to the party, I want to say how much I enjoy your review of The Perks of Being a Wall Flower. I read this a few months ago and I totally agree with your assessment. It is marvelous.

Also...Thumbs up from me! What an incredible review of Joyland. I'm going to obtain a copy and read it this summer.

All the best to you!

I agree with msf (Mark). I loved The Passage (I'd previously read Cronin's so-called "literary fiction", which is very good), but was extremely disappointed in The Twelve. My daughter who also loved The Passage, could not finish The Twelve. Being more of a completest I stuck it out to the bitter end. I'll be interested to see what you think when you get to The Twelve. I also agree with the recommendation for Wool, which I just finished.

Can you imagine it took me more than 6 months to locate your thread! All because you declared that you weren't going to maintain a thread here anymore and hence I never searched for one! Well, I atleast have some good reviews to look forward to.

Glad you found me. I declared but obviously not clearly enough. I'm low key here.

Low key is better than no key, obviously. Glad you liked Of Human Bondage too, far too many of my friends and acquaintances disliked it for some reason.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is on my TBR for this month, your rating for the book (staying away from reading your review until I read the book) is encouraging.

I wanted to read The Magus too, now I wonder...I did quite like The Collector though.

I had the same experience. I couldn't believe the same auhthor wrote both books.

Sequel to The Shining announced for this month!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/01/books-autumn-2013-shining-sequel?CM...

Book #19, The Things that Always Were by Solla Carrock

My Review on the book's home page:

As many as nine out of ten cases of physical child abuse go unreported every year in this country. That’s just the physical abuse, the breaking, bruising, burning version, where there is evidence, substance. Reports of neglect and outright emotional abuse are rarer, because they’re not really a crime, at least not the kind that gets prosecuted. Sure, neglect if severe enough can rouse the snoozing bureaucracies that are charged with protection of children. But who ever reported someone for just being downright mean to their kids, for treating them like so much trash. And the effects, while not visible, are far deeper – spirits mend slowly, if at all.

I’m not sure Solla Carrock set out to write a book about child abuse, at least not in-your-face, tell-all kind of expose. But The Things that Always Were is a subtle revelation about the interior world of an abused child. It’s Annie’s story, told in her voice and her thoughts. Annie, and her siblings, Danny, Renee, and Sammy, live with their mother, if you use the term ‘live with’ very loosely. The story covers three years, between 1959 and 1962. The summer of 1959 finds the children leaving Yakima with their mother, who’s just split up from their father. Soon, their mother checks herself into a mental facility and leaves them with the Willis family. The Willis farm is a hard place and the Willises are hard people. The kind of people who spank a child or frighten him with stories of his penis falling off for wetting the bed. Annie and the other kids are of free labor and a constant target for anger and bitterness at the farm. Eventually, their mother returns and moves them back to Yakima with Ray, another hard man, free with harsh words and the belt. Annie ends up being the target of most of the abuse, both physical and emotional. She is constantly made to feel that she can’t do anything right, even though she is expected to accept much of the adult responsibility in the household.

What’s special about Carrock’s account of Annie’s life over this three year period is the deftness in layering Annie’s life with the symptoms of abuse without hitting you over the head with them. The emotional content of Annie’s story is significantly dulled or absent altogether at times. Throughout the first half of the story, the absence is deafening. When you begin to match that loss of emotional communication and understanding with Annie’s social withdrawal, lack of self-confidence, and her avoidant mentality, you begin to get the point. But Annie perseveres, eventually finding her voice in school and in faith. She identifies her inner strength and grace,

“Maybe that was what grace meant, when you aren’t studying or memorizing or doing something that you know will be thought good. Maybe when you try something, that you’d like to hide for awhile, because you kind of like it, but you aren’t sure of it. But someone sees it, and they see you. And they think it is good too. Then you can feel it, the grace that is in you, that you didn’t have to do anything to get.”

Annie also eventually begins to see that she is not a bad kid, not a failure and screw-up, but that she has suffered for her mother’s own insecurities and selfishness,

“I figure, everyone has their one story they keep telling themselves over and over again, about who they are and what their life is. My mother has two stories, but they are really just one. Her story is: ‘I never got what I really wanted.’ And my story, maybe it’s the one about having a mother whose story is, ‘I never got what I really wanted,’ and how she took out all her hurt and pain on me. But I wonder what could happen if I told myself a different story, or even more than one.’

That Carrock’s Annie is a survivor when not all victims of abuse are survivors is not a fault for The Things that Always Were. Perhaps because Annie survives but doesn’t triumph, she merely begins to understand and grow – remember, this is no in-you-face expose. It’s just an honest book that subtly tries to find the truth in everyday life.

The Things that Always Were is not a perfect book. The lack of emotion in the first half of the book makes it hard to connect with the story, and with Annie. If there had been some connection with Annie’s plight before she is already changed by the abuse, it would be easier to care about her. But the faults of the book are overcome by its strengths. Annie’s voice is perfect, and Carrock never breaks from writing in her voice. And Carrock’s subtle touch is a gift in the midst of a topic that is rarely addressed with subtlety.

Bottom Line: A subtle, honest book about abuse and a persevering spirit.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #20-22, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, and Odd Hours by Dean Koontz

My Review on the book's home page:

I was an Odd fan – such a unique and fresh character. And his hometown was populated with such a great group of characters, all interesting in their own right, with a rare depth. The idea, the hook, for Odd’s powers was also new and interesting. Yes, a guy who sees dead people – but they can’t talk to him, and he feels a certain weight of responsibility to use the power, even if he regularly finds himself short of credentials for the things he finds himself doing. A self-aware and self-deprecating hero, and one with a true moral conscience. I was an Odd fan, right up until I finished the second book. The third book soured me almost completely. And the fourth book just mad me angry.

Given my feeling about these less than satisfying sequels, I’ve chosen to provide a single review of all three books. It’s appropriate both because I don’t want to waste more time or space than necessary and because my problems with the follow-on books are with them all.

I should have known there would be a drop-off in the stories at the conclusion of the first book, when Koontz killed Stormy, Odd’s girlfriend. That death was a declaration that Koontz did not intend for Odd to linger in his hometown with the wonderful group of people he’d created as a backdrop for Odd. While Forever Odd is set in Pico Mundo, California, Koontz isolates Odd from any of his friends in a flood channel underneath the city and surrounding desert and then in an abandoned and run down casino. At the end of the book, Odd declares that he is leaving town. Brother Odd picks up with Odd in an abbey in the high Sierra’s of California. When that adventure is complete, Odd makes like to return home but then again abandons one of his oldest friends and walks off into the sunset. Odd Hours makes it clear that Koontz has more global ideas for Odd, and this book seems to set up the framework for a larger, and more sinister, quest. While the book is set in a small coastal California town, the narrative and the new characters Koontz introduces suggest that Odd is at the center of storm that could blow him any which way.

On some level, Koontz’ precision and agility in creating interesting, deep characters is both a blessing and curse for these books. I wish I had listed the characters that Koontz has Odd run across who are abandoned in a few pages. I wanted to know more about these people and they seemed to have much more to say. And these quick hits pale in comparison to some of Odd’s original crew of friends, like Stormy, Chief Porter, and Little Ozzie. So, while I applaud Koontz’ skill – I am a Koontz fan and will remain so – I am a little peeved at him for abandoning Odd’s origins. The cynic in me can’t help but wonder if the direction of the books didn’t have something to do with the film adaptation of the first book. As the books progress, the plots seem to be more and more sensational and thriller-oriented, and Odd becomes more like Jack Ryan or Bond than he was ever imagined in the first book.

I was an Odd fan – I know I’m probably in the minority on this but now I’ll probably be reading the sequels now with a sick curiosity about how such a good idea could come apart.

Bottom Line: A good idea gone awry – sequels that can’t deliver on the promise.

3 bones!!!!!

What great reviews, Mac, and how we miss seeing you more frequently here!

Glad to see you post here, Mac. We have already had our chat about what went wrong with Odd Thomas. Unlike you, I am not sure how long (or if at all) will I follow the series. I am yet to read Odd Hours, but from your collective review of the three, I won't be holding my breath for if and when I do get to it.

Book #23, Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

Sequels are no easy thing to write – capturing lightning in a bottle once is hard enough, just ask the thousands of writers who’ve grabbed the bottle and lit out after a storm. Striking a perfect balance is so difficult, given that a good book usually sees the characters change, either for good or ill. To pick up a story without traveling the exact same ground and set the characters on another arc where they will change again is near impossible. To simply ask, “I wonder what happened to …” is not enough. The characters have to have something new to say and yet remain recognizable as the same characters that a reader invested in the first time around.

Stephen King waited 34 long years before he decided to answer, “What happened to Danny Torrance?” What happened to that little boy with ‘the shine’ who watched his father slowly go mad and try to kill him? The Shining is a hallmark novel, twice adapted into films and a fixture in our popular culture. Part of the reason for The Shining’s place in the canon of horror literature is its ability to tap into our raw and visceral emotions. The book is much more than a scare-fest, as anyone who has read can attest. It is a a book about addiction; its’ a book about temptation and the corruption of the soul; it is a book about the power of good over evil, but how it’s a close call. And at the end of the book, Danny, a five-year old boy, sits among the smoldering remains of the Overlook Hotel, his mother and a close friend near mortally wounded. What will become of a boy with such a powerful gift who has suffered through such a harrowing ordeal at such an age?

Over the years, King has said that he wondered what became of Danny and wondered what his story would be like. But it wasn’t until 34 years had passed, with King in his sixth decade, that he started to write that story. The result is Doctor Sleep.

Danny, like his father, is an alcoholic. Like millions before him, no matter his intimate knowledge of the bottle and its consequences, Danny cannot beat the bottle. The book begins with what alcoholics call ‘the bottom,’ an episode in his life that finally delivers what he needs to begin the long struggle to sobriety. As Danny travels nomadically maneuvers the country, an evil also travels the country, feeding on the lives of people like him, people who ‘shine.’

As much as Doctor Sleep deals with Danny’s addiction, this book is much less about addictive temptation and corruption than The Shining. No, Doctor Sleep is about mortality purification. Jack, Danny’s father, was never able to withstand the corruptive influences around him. He stood true once, at the end, in a single heroic and self-sacrificial act to save his son; but the truth was that single act also to stopped his own pain. What Danny learns is that you purify yourself with small choices and daily efforts, proving yourself worthy for the death that awaits us all.

King’s written a beautiful book, one that is full of the wisdom that only a few extra years walking the road can provide and the perspective that is only focused by living closer to death than to birth. He is a man certain of his own mortality who seems to be figuring out what it means to live. Yes, Danny’s life was worth checking in on; it turns out he had a lot to say and a lot to show us.

Bottom Line: A beautifully written sequel about our own mortality.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year!!!!

Thanks, roni and piyush. I've had a lot of work and not much time to post - so, these are overdue.

piyush, I noted that there is word that the film version of Odd Thomas is now available to rent in some places, it urns out it was difficult to get released. I may try that out.

Book #24, The Twelve by Justin Cronin

My Review on the book's home page:

Justin Cronin’s The Twelve picks up the apocalyptic and dystopian story he began with The Passage. Some 100 years after the destruction of most of civilization at the hands of a race of beastly vampires, several bands of humans try to rebuild. At the center of the story is one particular group from an outpost in California and a young girl who has been infected with the same virus that created the vampire plague.

It’s difficult to distill the story Cronin tells with The Twelve, just as it was with the first book in the series. The sheer depth and breadth of the story is measure. Cronin adroitly shifts back and forth in time, picking up loose threads from the original story and weaving them into the story as it has grown with time. We find the backstory of a new band of survivors from Kerrville, TX, and how they fit into the new events surrounding Amy and Peter. We learn more about the history of the original twelve vampires. And we learn how the twelve have found a way to begin to organize and harvest the blood they need to survive without extinction. But the thrust of the story is the coming war between the vampires and the survivors.

The fact that the story is hard to distill reflect the principal strengths of Cronin’s storytelling. First, the story is humungous – epic is such a trite word, and humungous is really more fitting. Second, with such a large story, in time and space and character, it would be easy to lose track of some of the threads. But Cronin’s narrative never loses focus and his characters are never empty or inconsistent. Finally, the space such a big novel creates leaves a lot of room for Cronin to show off his prose. Such a big space might prove too big to fill, but Cronin takes his time and each line, each paragraph, each chapter hits just the right note. I never got tired or impatient with the story or with Cronin. The book is a great object lesson for writers in taking your time and letting your voice find its own pace.

Bottom Line: Humungous story but one that never gets lost, hitting just the right note.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #25, Curfew by Phil Rickman

My Review on the book's home page:

All things lead to Stephen King – I know you guys are tired of hearing me go on about my favorite, but it’s true. I look for books that King has recommended or reviewed over the years. When King says that Phil Rickman’s Curfew was ‘creepy,’ I take note. If it can creep King out, I’m in. And I admit, I had to put the book down a couple of times after particularly creepy passages.

For centuries, people have been obsessed with ‘ley-lines’ in Britain, especially those that are still marked with stones, like the stones at Stonehenge. For one backwards village, in the borderland near Wales, the obsession was not born of curiosity or wonder, but of fear. Crybbe’s church bell has rung one hundred times every night for 400 years. What do the bells ward the town against? Max Goff, a millionaire record executive, begins to re-erect stones along ley-lines where they were removed long ago, hoping to establish the town as a center for new age enlightenment and spiritual awakening. As he repositions the stones, something rather darker that what Goff intended begins to grow in Crybbe. People begin to see sinister things in their homes; they begin to act in strange and violently inappropriate ways. The village keeps ringing the bell, hoping that what’s worked for 400 years will work again.

This book was a revelation to me – you can still uncover amazing and refreshing writers. I was hooked from the first few lines – let’s see if I can hook you,

“In Crybbe, night did not fall. Night rose. It welled out of the bitter brown earth caged in brambles in the neglected wood beyond the churchyard, swarming up the trees until they turned black and began to absorb the sky.”

After reading those lines, I bought the book and begin reading it pretty much immediately.

Rickman is not well-known in America, though he has been fairly successful in Britain, having won awards for his TV and radio journalism. He also writes, under pseudonyms, a few successful series of supernatural mysteries, chief among them the Merrily Watkins books about an Anglican priest and mother. Many of his standalone novels have recently been reprinted here in America, among them Curfew.

Rickman’s talent is his language and the ability to gradually build suspense. He’s no slouch at storytelling, but the story occasionally got convoluted and meandered a little. But with his skill at creating tone and pace with word choice alone, he never loses the reader. Even when the story is a little unclear, his language draws you in closer, until your slapped back at some unearthly, and often revolting, revelation.

Bottom Line: Creepy book, with a tone and pace created from beautifully chosen language.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Mac! Great to hear from you again!

I agree completely with your review of Doctor Sleep. It was easily one of the best I've read this year. I'm glad you like The Twelve. It's on my short-term list.

Hi Mac! Saw you posted and stopped in to say hello. :)

Glad to see you here Dk. Saw you had a bunch of reviews.

Hi, Mac! It's good to see you here with your great reviews! I absolutely must get around to reading Doctor Sleep, perhaps when the library demand for it drops a bit. I had to laugh -- I originally typed it here with the abbreviation, "Dr. Sleep," and the touchstone that came up was for Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book!

I've read a few of Phil Rickman's Merrily Watson series. I've found them a little uneven, but even when they don't quite hit the mark, they are NEVER the "same old same old" -- no horror cliches. I'm not sure if I've read any of his stand-alone novels yet. Curfew sounds like a good one!

Yes to both, but especially Doctor Sleep - slip the librarian a couple of bucks and move yourself up the list.

Book #26, Divergent by Veronica Roth

My Review on the book's home page:

In a dystopian wasteland, citizens are segregated and isolated into tribes. At a ceremony, an adolescent girl is forced to choose a violent world in order to hide her true nature and protect her family. Soon she realizes that the world’s leaders are involved in a dangerous conspiracy meant to expand their control, and she becomes the focus of a revolution.

No, I have not just described The Hunger Games or any of its progeny. I’ve already reviewed those books and found them to be franchise-driven rip offs of other, better dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. No, the synopsis is for a much better, and cleverer, book, Divergent, by Veronica Roth. It’s true that Divergent was published the year after Collins began publishing her trilogy. But Roth is not a thief, of Collins or of any other writer for that matter. While her story bears some resemblance to some other stories in the same genre – it’s hard not to see Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in many of these types of books – Roth’s story is unique and fresh.

Tris, short for Beatrice, belongs to the Agnegation factions. This faction seeks selflessness as a directive principle in their lives. The other factions are Amity, Dauntless, Candor, and Erudite – you can probably figure out the principles for each of these factions from their names. Based on their principles, each faction serves a particular purpose in the world. Abnegation citizens populate the government, with the idea that a truly selfless person will seek the best for all others and be difficult to corrupt. At the age of sixteen, each person is put through a test to determine which of the factions their personality best suits. Tris learns during this test that she is a Divergent, exhibiting strong personality traits for more than one of the factions, a condition that her tester advises her to hide. At her choosing ceremonies she chooses to switch factions and joins Dauntless. There she is schooled in the art of war and violence. During her training, she uncovers an Erudite conspiracy to wipe out the Abnegation faction. Tris’ Divergent personality gives her a weapon to use in protecting her former faction.

One of the best, and freshest, parts of Divergent is Roth’s construction of a dystopian world in which to tell her story. The idea that a citizenry would choose to organize itself on certain unifying principles of thought is really quite unique. The resulting world is just as unique. As with any system of government or organization involving humans, there are problems and corrupting influences. But Roth has removed religion and race altogether, choosing ideas as a way to separate people. How these principles play out in everyday life makes for imminently interesting character arcs and plot material. There are a couple of other pretty unique twists on science fiction ideas that Roth uses for the citizen testing and for Tris’ training, but I’ll let those be discoveries.

Another reason that Divergent is head and shoulders above that other series of books is her main character. Where the girl on fire in the other books is whiny, hormone-addled, and indecisive, Tris is fierce, smart, and vulnerable in an interesting way. Both books are told in the first person, but I didn’t mind listening to Tris’ thoughts. While she has the typical difficulties of a sixteen-year-old girl, she faces them head on. She’s a lot more like Harper Lee’s Scout than any of the other more recent adolescent heroines.

I read this one on the recommendation of my wife, and I’m glad I did. Yes, Roth sold the rights to the stories and there is a movie coming out soon. Yes, this is the first in what is likely to be a trilogy. But, hey, Tolkein and Lewis both wrote series and we don’t fault them for it. While this book isn’t on the Tolkein or Lewis plane, it is much better than the tripe that we’ve had to suffer through with the girl on fire and shiny vampires.

Bottom Line: Fresh dystopian book – better than the stuff we’ve been seeing on the market lately.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!

Mrsdrneutron highly recommended it to me too!

Love the review! It's been on my shelf since release, but I haven't read it yet. Will definitely get to it soon, before the film at least!

Right up your alley, faith

I am planning to read Divergent early in 2014 too, good to know you enjoyed it as well.

Book #27, Benediction by Kent Haruf

My Review on the book's home page:

“The precious ordinary.” In that one short phrase, Kent Haruf sums up his newest book Benediction, but he could have been speaking of the two previous Holt, Colorado books as well, Plainsong and Eventide.

When he speaks this phrase, Reverend Lyle is on the eve of his dismissal for preaching about loving your enemies. He has taken Jesus’ teaching too far, asking his listeners to take the principle literally in everyday life, even to the point of forgiving those who would attack our country and way of life. Parishioners are incensed that he could believe the Bible would expect anyone to really turn the other cheek in the face of a truly violent and hateful enemy. So, expecting to be removed, Lyle takes a walk in the dark, sleepy town, peering into houses. A police officer confronts Lyle and he explains, “People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. I’d hoped to recapture something. … The precious ordinary.”

Lyle is not the only Holt resident trying to recapture something. Dad Lewis is dying, within a month of his final day. Benediction begins with his story, traveling back from the doctor’s office, the grim news freshly delivered. Upon arriving home, he takes stock, “He sat and drank the beer and held his wife’s hand sitting on the front porch. So the truth was he was dying. That’s what they were saying. He would be dead before the end of the summer. By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town. Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.” Over the course of the summer, Dad takes all of his days on this earth into account, the good and the bad, trying to figure what a life amounts to.

There is a plainness in Haruf’s story and writing, an unsentimental nature that cuts to the quick of the truth. For Haruf, and his characters, life is made in the small, ordinary moments of the day. They are the moments when we evince our true nature, our deeply held beliefs, in a small choice or simple act of courage, not with fanfare but in a whisper.

The reference to “the precious ordinary” reminded me of something Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” Haruf is the very epitome of Hemingway’s advice. His ability to boil his message to its simplest form makes the truth of it that much more powerful. There is no deep philosophy or eloquent logic played out over pages and pages. Benediction, and the books that preceded it, tell stories about real people, people who you might know, people who are living their lives in houses along a street where someone might try to look inside and recapture some truth. The power of these people’s stories is in their familiarity, the likelihood that you’ve faced the same simple choice or situation and will someday try to figure what your life amounts to.

Haruf is not an apologist for simplicity, nor is he a proponent. He is just a scribe of the simple and true. He is not afraid to embrace the precious ordinary. He can tell the story of the man who owns the hardware store facing death and fearing its obscurity. He can tell the story of the preacher who believes the Bible is literal and true, no matter the consequences. Life is filled with far more of these stories than it is of any other kind.

Bottom Line: The precious ordinary.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year.

Hi Mac! I can't wait to read Eventide and Benediction next year. I loved Plainsong. Haruf definitely has a way with words.

You'll love them, I'm sure

Best wishes to you for the holidays, and a great 2014, Mac!

And to you!

Merry Christmas, Mac!

Merry Christmas, ronni and all!!!

Merry Christmas Mac, and happy holidays :)

Merry Christmas, Mac!

I'm glad to read your comments about the Odd Thomas books above. I was feeling the same after the second and third books. I've picked up Odd Hours several times over the last year, and always ended up putting it back without starting it. I think your point about characters moving in and out is an excellent way of explaining why I'm losing my enthusiasm. I really liked the first book, and I was extremely unhappy about Stormy. She was a great character.

So now I don't feel so bad for not getting to the next book!

Book #29, The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy

My Review on the book's home page:

McCarthy inspires adoration among his readers – including me – while inspiring similarly strong feelings in the negative. Over the years, the controversial hermit has attained more popularity but at a cost. In a fashion that can really only be described as McCarthyian, he has continued to stretch himself to the very limits of his craft. So, what does his first book, The Orchard Keeper reveal about him?

The Orchard Keeper tells the story, use the term lossely, of John Wesley Rattner whose father has disappeared. Rattner befriends the man who killed his father, Marion Sylder. There is really not much more of a story, except for the bits that deal with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, who lives on an orchard where Sylder dumped the body.

The set-up here is very Greek – a young man seeks a father figure in the man who took his father’s life. And that is typical McCarthy – large, beefy themes. But what’s missing is the story-telling that marks the latter McCarthy work. With Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, there is such a strong sense of the narrative driving a story. But with The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy seems lost in the sound of his own prose. I’ll admit the prose is easily distracting, but it never seems to serve a greater narrative purpose. This is McCarthy at his best in reflecting a sense of tone and place that is unique to a region, in this case Tennessee hill country. And he is at his best creating memorable and eccentrically distinct characters. But the storytelling is lacking here. Long stretches go by with nothing happening outside of McCarthy’s description of a piece of the countryside. It is poetic and beautiful, but it is repetitive and tiring after a bit. It creeps and meanders like so much kudzu.

When he moved to El Paso in search of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s writing took on the sparseness of the desert southwest, and things clicked. The Orchard Keeper was not the McCarthy I love yet, but he was close.

Bottom Line: Beautiful written prose, but the storytelling is not up to McCarthy’s best – it is his first novel.

4 bones!!!!!

Gotta get myself some McCarthy!

Book #30, Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

My Review on the book's home page:

Confessions of an Opium Eater – that sounds like good reading, yeah? Thomas De Quincey published the autobiographical account of his laudanum habit, and its consequences, in 1821 – heady stuff for a time when physical addiction wasn’t yet on the radar. Six years later, De Quincey wrote On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, a satirical essay that examined a series of infamous London murders, the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811. De Quincey’s writing, though not well-known in the mainstream, heavily influenced crime fiction of the time, including Poe’s, and in turn, Doyle’s.

David Morrell has been writing thriller and mystery fiction for over forty years. His first novel, First Blood, gave us John Rambo, a name you may recognize from the movie franchise. Along the way, he’s produced numerous espionage books, including The Brotherhood of the Rose series; he reimagined lycanthropes as victims of a viral disease in The Totem; and he’s popularized urban explorers, also known as Creepers. Most are only familiar with his work from the Rambo movies, but anyone who has read his books can attest to the depth of his stories and characters.

Morrell and De Quincey is a match made in heaven. Murder as a Fine Art, Morrell’s latest novel, feature a new set of murders that mimic the Ratcliffe Highway murders some forty-three years later. As London burns with panic, the police begin to focus on De Quincey as a principal suspect because of his writing on the original murders. With few options, De Quincey must solve the new murders to clear his name, aided by his young daughter and two dismissed officers.

Morrell’s account of Victorian London is a revelation, imminently equal to Collins or Doyle. While some historical fiction gives you the sense that you are looking back on events, Morrell puts you squarely in the middle of a time and place as though he was writing from 1854. His forty years of experience in the thriller genre infuses the story with a sense of urgency and anticipation that demands reading. And he’s cast De Quincey as a sort of psychologically oriented Sherlock, favoring a modern behavioral analysis over the examination of minute physical details.

Bottom Line: Historical fiction that places you in the middle of the action, rather than as a detached observer, with a detective that rivals Sherlock himself.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #31, Taking the Wall by Jonis Agee

My Review on the book's home page:

I don’t wear that kind of ball-cap. You know the kind – the ones that are plastic mesh on the back half and cushiony polyester up front. They usually have some kind of business logo up front because these are the cheapest kind of give-aways. You might find the bill rolled to an unnatural cone shape and the front marked with grease and oil smudges. I don’t wear that kind of ball-cap, but the characters who populate Jonis Agee’s collection of short fiction, Taking the Wall, wear that kind of ball-cap with pride.

Most of you won’t have ever heard of Jonis Agee. Yet three of her books were chosen as New York Times Notable Books of the Year: Bend This Heart, 1989; Sweet Eyes, 1991; and Strange Angels, 1993. Her milieu is the American Midwest and the characters of her books are the people who populate the small towns there. She gives voice to the frustrated narrow existence of the common people and finds the beauty in their simple, noble lives.

Taking the Wall focuses on race car driving, not NASCAR and Winston Cup, so much as dirt tracks in fields and demolition derbies. This is not a world that I would have ever wanted to read about, but Agee is a favorite author, so I dipped into the stories and found I couldn’t get away. Even though the stories describe races and cars, they are really about the lonely and broken people sliding through life one corner at a time, trying to avoid another encounter with the wall. Agee’s stories are riveting, largely due to her ability to tap into a common longing in the human soul. These people dream of better, even if it is out of their reach or they are incapable of seizing it. And when paired with Agee’s near perfect prose, the result is stunning. Let me let Agee speak for herself:

“You have to dream your way back to beginnings, that’s why stories start in the middle, like a fingering away from some rock you can’t see but imagine has to be there. Everything lives in a bowl the size it requires. The bucket of night that holds our melting sleep. Even the clar hard soil of Esparance’s farm found ways to use the burnt sticky liquor spilling from dreams. I know Blu’s gone on ahead of me now, so I stop in Missouri.”

Bottom Line: Sherwood Anderson for the racing fan – more about the unseen lives of common folk than about racing, Sherwood would have been proud.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #32, Now and Forever by Ray Bradbury

My Review on the book's home page:

Writers are often at their best when they begin facing their own mortality. Drawing closer to the end of things than they are to the beginning helps tap into a new level of depth and focus. The characters and stories have an urgency that cannot be ignored. “Listen to me, please. I can help unlock the mystery,” they seem to say.

Now and Forever was published in 2007 – Ray Bradbury died just five years later. Both of the novellas that make up the book are ones that Bradbury confesses he had been picking at for decades. But he could never quite unlock these stories, not until twilight was setting for him.

“Somewhere a Band Is Playing” is the first story. Bradbury’s introduction provides some insight into the long process that gave birth to this particular story. Years visiting a desert town, encounters with a movie star, and an orphan poem were all kicking around in his head for years before he completed the story about a magical town where no one ages. It’s not just any old magical town, though. This town is populated exclusively with writers. And the town is in danger of being discovered and razed to make room for a new interstate highway. The town is saved by a writer, of course, who warns the inhabitants rather than writing the newspaper story that he meant to write. He finds love in the town, and he is allowed to join the community. Interesting, don’t you think, that a writer saves an ageless town of writers by choosing life over a story. What must Bradbury have been thinking about?

“Leviathan 99” is the second story. It is an homage to Melville’s Moby Dick. But Bradbury transitions the story to deep space, with the mad captain of a spaceship hunting a destructive comet. Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s film adaptation of Moby Dick in 1959. After that, he tried several times to move the story into space for the radio or television, settling for stage play that was never well received. Bradbury spent decades working on this story of a lone-survivor who tells a story. And it is one of the last stories he published.

Bottom Line: An author in his twilight years focused on his own mortality.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

That's a great review, and you got me with a BB!

Quite a few good books and reviews there!

Finishing off your books before the year ends, or catching up on your pending reviews?

Reading a lot, piyush.

Good that you have been able to spare more time for reading. But does that imply your writing time suffering, or are you taking a break?

Everything suffered this year from my day job - things got quite imbalanced. I managed a little writing on a story I'd already worked on a bit, but I didn't get to do much of that or reading. I've had some leave here at the end of the year and I'm trying to get back in the swing of things.

Book #33, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My Review on the book's home page:

The ‘YA-Young Adult’ market is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. So much of what is available in this ‘genre’ seems tailored to one popular milieu or another. And the writing is often not intelligent, almost dumbed down to a particular reading level, so as to maximize the market. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is not the stuff of typical YA.

Though told in the first person, another device common to modern YA, the narrator, Hazel, is intelligent and raw. Hazel is dying of cancer, but she’s doing it very slowly thanks to an experimental drug that stifles the growth of cancer cells. While Hazel is physically vulnerable, she is an emotional force. She may go to a cancer support group, but her irreverence toward everything about it is refreshing. She is not irreverent to the sick and dying but to the clichéd way that the healthy folks try to relate. The closest comparison I could give you is to veterans who refuse to relate to anyone who hasn’t experienced what they’ve experienced. While suffering through one of the support group meetings, Hazel meets Augustus, a cancer survivor, who is as irreverent as she is but with a large dollop of hope. His hope changes Hazel.

Hazel and Augustus are memorable and interesting characters. They are smart and their stories are told by Green in a smart way. There is now dumbing things down in this book. Quite the opposite, the story and the characters are provocative and engaging in a way that YA characters rarely are.

Bottom Line: A smart and wry book.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #33, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

My Review on the book's home page:

Hemingway’s collection of short fiction, In Our Time was his first published work, coming in 1925, just a year before The Sun Also Rises was published. He wrote the stories between 1921 and 1925, during his stay in Paris with those of the ‘Lost Generation.’ What everyone suspects about the autobiographical nature of the stories contained in the book could only be clear decades later. They are deeply personal and foreshadow the conflict within Hemingway’s soul that he would write about throughout his life.

The book is arranged in chronological fashion, mostly following the life of Nick Adams, a figure that is a thinly veiled iteration of Hemingway himself. Even the stories that don’t mention Nick, seem to be told from his perspective as he observes life around him. The early stories feature Nick in his home territory in Michigan, fishing, drinking, and observing the people and the nature of his home. What shines through these stories is Nick’s, and Hemingway’s, emerging unease and disaffection. The stories are broken by vignettes, what would be called flash fiction today, featuring later events in Nick’s life. Each of the vignettes leading up to Nick’s departure from Michigan, and then the United States, are violent episodes from war and bull-fighting; the physical violence of each a projection of the interior conflict in the longer stories. Nick goes to war, is wounded, and then returns to the United States. Eventually, he returns to the nature of his home, alone, finding peace only there in nature. Among the most personal stories is “A Very Short Story” that tells of Nick, and Hemingway, falling in love with a nurse during his convalescence. Anyone familiar with Hemingway’s work and life will see the story that became A Farewell to Arms.

As personal as these stories are, they are basted in universal elements of the human condition. And as easy as it is to recognize Hemingway in them, it is easy to find yourself in them as well. They are so boldly honest when you least expect them to be. These stories haunt.

Bottom Line: Personal stories that translate to themes for all.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year.

#112 Well, good that you got the year end leave at least! *looking at the silver lining here*

Guess I will skip the Hemingway, despite your glowing review.