BiblioAddict

On falling in love, falling out of love, killing a healthy horse then beating it with a stick, and wishing you could forget so many of the things you remember:

The Stone Gods
By Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt/April 2008
224 pps/$24.00

This book started off great. In fact, if you remember from a few posts ago, I said that it was virtually love, and it was. I loved everything about in the first two thirds of this book. This was my first Jeanette Winterson novel, but she impressed me as a smart and creative writer who wasn’t afraid to think outside of the box. It sounds corny, I know, but for someone who reads as much as I do, it was nice to face the unexpected on virtually every page. With its various narrative twists and turns, along with its often beautiful turns of phrases, The Stone Gods was one beautiful unpredictability after another.

I don’t usually attempt to summarize books, and in this case I think it would be virtually impossible. Impossible, at least, to do it in a way that would leave you knowing more about the book rather than less. I could, however, tell you that it’s about the fragility of life, and not only our lives but that of the planet. It’s about how, despite our good intentions, we may be doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. It’s about how in the face of that inevitability we can only give the best we’ve got, and love no matter how short our time is. It’s about stories and their power to sustain us until humanity’s time on this planet is done.

But, then… that last third. I’m not sure what happened, but my opinion took a precipitous turn for the worse. Well, I could hazard a guess. It seemed as if, for the final third, Winterson turned the volume up of the book and everything that I’d previously liked about the novel suddenly seemed too shrill, too preachy, too out-of-the-box, too…everything. Winterson took a healthy horse and beat. It. To. Death. With a stick. Instead of the satisfied reluctance I usually turn the last page of a book I loved, I closed The Stone Gods with a “Good grief, I’m glad that’s over.”

And I was. I was incredibly relieved to close the book on The Stone Gods. But as with all novels that exhibit such promise in the beginning which isn’t fulfilled in the end, I was sorely disappointed. Such promise, so wasted. Luckily, the first two thirds of the book is comprised of stories that could stand alone from the last one. So, if I do return to this novel sometime in the future I’ll simply read those stories that I loved and pretend the last one doesn’t exist. In fact, I wish I could do that now.

P.S. Happy Independence Day, everyone!!!  May you eat much barbecue and see many colors in the sky this evening.

On good timing, falling for Christine, and pretending to be a god you’re not:

Christine Falls: A Novel
By Benjamin Black
Picador USA / Jan. 2008
384 pgs. / $14.00

It’s an old saying that there’s a time and a place for everything, but it has only recently occurred to me that this old adage could apply to reading certain books as well. Has this ever happened to you: you’re reading a book which you fully expected to like, but for some reason you just can’t get that into it. You put it down and come back to it days, weeks, months, or even years later and suddenly you can’t turn the pages fast enough. Nothing about the book is significantly different, but it’s as if in the interim you managed to attain the right mood or disposition required to appreciate the particular novel or subject.

It took me months to finish Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. Initially, I was excited to finally have a paperback copy of this novel I’d heard so much about. As soon as I bought it I promptly dived in and… was just unmoved. I couldn’t figure out. The writing was fine, the story was interesting I just couldn’t get into it. Every time I picked it up I wanted to be reading something else.

So I essentially put it down, though I left in my bookmark and continued to carry it around in my bag, hoping for the day when the mood would finally strike. Christine Falls and I walked around with each other for two months until last week when, as I was unpacking my bag of books at the end of the day, I looked at it, opened it to the last page I’d read, and couldn’t put it down.

I’ve said it already but the prose style wasn’t as good for me as Kate Atkinson’s, and I sometimes found the characters’ motivations inscrutable. But the story was a good one, though not very much of a mystery. Part of the mystery is explained half-way through the novel and the other part is nothing you probably won’t have already figured out on your own. Yet, the way that Black unfolds the story slowly and methodically with prose that is understated but never uninteresting, makes this book well worth reading.

And it is an engrossing study of the main character Quirke, the pathologist whose investigation into the death of Christine Falls sets the novel’s events into motion. The way that Quirke develops over the course of the novel was the most interesting aspect of the book to me. In the beginning, he’s a bit of an irresponsible alcoholic who’s more concerned with cracking his next joke than righting any wrongs. By the end of the novel, however, an aggrieved old acquaintance tells him, “You’re not funny anymore.” And indeed he’s not. He’s become stubborn, more surly than usual, and open to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with righting a few wrongs even if the outcome doesn’t directly affect you.

I thought it an amazing coincidence that I finally finished reading this novel only weeks after I watched “Gone Baby Gone” for the first time. Both the movie and the novel raises some interesting questions on the moral right that someone does or does not have to take a child without their parent’s consent because they think they’re capable of providing the child with a better and happier future than they’re likely to get a home. Both the film and book agree that no one has the right to take a child from their parents unless the child is being abused, and if they are, that proper and legal channels should be taken to ensure their safety.

But “Gone Baby Gone” to a slightly greater degree than Christine Falls forces you to reside in that gray area of uncertainty. It forces you to admit that you don’t really know how the future will turn out for any child. Pretending you know is pretending to be God. And men pretending to be God in both the movie and the novel only leads to trouble.

On not finishing enough novels and starting too many, liking Christine but not as much as Kate, falling in love with literary satire sci-fi (or should it be ’sci-fi satire’?), and mythical planets in the ocean of space:

Last evening I finally finished Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. I’ll have more on that later, but I will say that, though it was slow going in the beginning (which I credit more to me than I do to the book), it was a good read. It didn’t impress me as much as Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories - another “literary mystery” - but I was satisfied by the time I turned the final page.

And what do I do when I finally finish a book? Why start two more, of course. I was just so excited about my new book pile that I had to dive right in: I’ve started both A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz and The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson. I haven’t gotten very far in A Voyage Long and Strange, but I’m fifty pages into The Stone Gods and, well, this is love.

I can’t speak for the rest of the book, but the first 1/3 is amazing. More than a few passages and sentences have quite simply bowled me over with their weight. I’d be gushing right now if it wasn’t just a bit preemptive. Yet, within the first fifty pages I’ve gotten a dying planet, a totalitarian government, legalized pedophilia (or, something uncomfortably very much like it), human genetic mutation, sexy robots (is there any other kind, really?), and the discovery of a new hospitable planet called Planet Blue.

It sounds like your run-of-the-mill sci-fi, I know, but it’s smart, it’s witty, and so far it reads more like satire than science fiction. It’s set in the future, but so far it’s been very much a commentary on our modern world: Western hypocrisy, our obsession with youth and beauty, the heights and lows of technology - all get their due.

There are two passages that I just must quote because they sealed the deal on the relationship between The Stone Gods and I. Backstory: The main character Billie is on a spaceship bound for Planet Blue, and the well-traveled crew is telling stories “the way all shipcrew tell stories.” These are two of the stories they tell:

There’s a planet they call Medusa. It’s made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times that there’s nothing solid - just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick plaits of hair. Like snakes. When the sky-winds blow, the rock-strands move, and something about the wind through them makes them sing. It’s as if a head is turned away from you, always turned away, and singing through the darkness, dark and lonely, never see her face…

There’s a planet called Echo. It doesn’t exist. It’s like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there’s nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had black beards had white. Then it was gone, echoing in another part of the starry sky, always, ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘here’, but nowhere. Some call it Hope.

On the collapse of empathy, the crisis of love, the issues that divide us, and the books that bring us together:

From Bookforum’s “Reflections” –

There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. In recent times, we have lived through not so much a crisis of politics as a collapse of that most human attribute, empathy, a collapse so catastrophic it sometimes appears to be a crisis of love, manifest in epidemics of loneliness and depression. Among Western societies, this strange event seems most pronounced in the United States, a country where pessimism about the future of the novel has become the most persistent literary tradition.

We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism—for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. But at its best, art reminds us of all that we share, of all that brings us together. For this reason, books matter. For this reason, books aren’t just novelty items or celebrity accompaniments, one more marketing platform for the famous and the powerful. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, great books show us that we are neither alone nor in the end that different, that what joins us is always more important than what divides us, and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression.

– Richard Flanagan, author of The Unknown Terrorist

The rest of the reflections in this piece, written by several different authors on the intermarriage of politics and literature, are so good that if I were you I wouldn’t be surprised if I posted more than a few of them over the coming days.

On Vogue’s accessories closet, fashion faux pas, another closed indie bookstore, crazier addictions and even crazier promises to stop, and a great pile of books:

There’s a scene in an episode of “Sex in the City” where Carrie Bradshaw is given access to Vogue’s accessories closet. Held in a room the size of a normal person’s living room are accessories on loan from every high fashion designer in the industry; some of the items most people never get to see unless they have a bank account of like a gajillion dollars. When faced with this holy of grail of fashion, Carrie stutters, “It’s just — It’s just too good!”

Now, I’ve never been that big on fashion myself. In fact - well, let me not get to started on my many and notorious fashion faux pas. I don’t know fashion. What I do know is exactly how Carrie felt because it’s how I felt when I walked into Olsson’s Books & Records yesterday afternoon. Everything, I mean everything in the bookstore was marked 50% to 75% off. It was just - it was just too good!

Now the reason for this incredible occasion was not exactly a happy one: yet another independent bookstore was closing its doors. This particular closing had less to do with poor book sales and more to do with the fact that their lease expired and their landlord “decided to go in a different direction.” The bookstore is in the middle of popular and trendy part of town so I have no doubt that the landlord has decided to boot out the bookstore for something a little more highbrow - like, for instance, yet another trendy restaurant for all those people who like expensive eating before they head across the street to the movie theater. Whatever.

Thankfully, it’s an independent chain of bookstores so there are other locations in and around the city for those of us who like read as much as we like to eat (in my case, maybe more). So, it was with no small amount of glee that I walked over to the store on my lunch break…

and came out with 13 books an hour and half later.

Somebody should stop me, because obviously this chick can’t control herself. Thirteen books? I should feel bad. I really, really, really should feel bad. And I do… mostly. I feel so bad that I’m banning myself from the bookstore for the rest of the summer. Really.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, yeah right; you don’t have the guts, the gumption, the willpower, or the self-preservation. You’re probably right on all four counts, but I am dead determined this time. No joking around; no ‘oh, I’ll just stop in for a second to look around.’ Nope, none of that. This time I’ll be avoiding bookstores like the plague. Besides, will it really be such a hardship when I just bought about every most-coveted book on my TBR list?

These should keep me busy for a very long time (I pray, oh let it be so):

1. The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich. From the Synopsis:

From a young writer of exceptional promise, this refreshingly original novel is a meditation on the frustrations of love, the madness of mayors, the failings of language, and the transformative powers of storytelling.

From Stephen King:

I read The Mayor’s Tongue with ever-increasing delight, rooting with all my heart for the young protagonist on his near-mythic quest. This is an elegantly-structured, brilliantly-told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny, and always generous and magical. The Mayor’s Tongue is about how we talk to each other and how make-believe helps us get on with our lives; most of all, it’s about love. Kudos to Nathaniel Rich, who has created a brave book, a novel brimming with brio.

2. I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloan Crosley. From the Synopsis:

Wry, hilarious, and profoundly genuine, this debut collection of literary essays is a celebration of fallibility and haplessness in all their glory. From despoiling an exhibit at the Natural History Museum to provoking the ire of her first boss to siccing the cops on her mysterious neighbor, Crosley can do no right despite the best of intentions-or perhaps because of them.

3. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley. From the Snynopsis:

BOOMSDAY’S heroine is Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger who incites massive political turmoil when, outraged over mounting Social Security debt, she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75. Her modest proposal catches fire with millions of her outraged peers (”Generation Whatever”) and an ambitious Senator seeking to gain the youth vote in his presidential campaign.

4. A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore ed. by Harold Courlander. From the Synopsis:

In A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore, editor Harold Courlander brings together an extensive and unique collection of tales, recollections, epics, traditions, beliefs, myths, historical chronicles, and songs from the numerous Negro cultures of the New World. Courlander explores the unwritten traditions and literature of the Spanish, French, and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, the areas of Central and South America inhabited by people of African descent, the black communities of the United States, and many others.

5. Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates. From the Synopsis:

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (”Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius”….

6. The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. From Daniel Gilbert in “The Washington Post”:

In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about happiness, including who’s happy and who isn’t. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren’t, and Americans are somewhere in between. Eric Weiner—a peripatetic journalist and self-proclaimed grump—wanted to know why. So with science as his compass, he spent a year visiting the world’s most and least happy places, and the result is a charming, funny and illuminating travelogue called The Geography of Bliss…

7. Other Colors: Essays and a Story by Orhan Pamuk. From the Synopsis:

Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City…. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.

8. Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe. From the Synopsis:

Jamestown chronicles a group of “settlers” (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what’s left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal is to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Based on actual accounts of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to 1617, Jamestown features historical characters including John Smith, Pocahontas, and others enacting an imaginative re-version of life in the pioneer colony.

9. Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. From “Kirkus Reviews”:

Rival gangs of werewolves duke it out for control of Los Angeles in this dark but oddly tender free-verse novel. The werewolves of Barlow’s imagined world don’t adhere to traditional rules-descendents of the ancient lycanthropes, they feed on flesh and are able to change from man to dog whenever they please, regardless of the lunar cycle…A refreshing leap across genres.

10. The Day Freedom Died by Charles Lane. From the Synopsis:

Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga.

11. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes. From “The Washington Post”:

…[a] strange, outrageous and wonderful extravaganza…Variously a satire, an adventure, a mystery and a horror show…There is much that is strange, magical and darkly hilarious in this book, at least if one savors the sardonic and the bizarre. At various points it recalls Dickens, Alice in Wonderland and Frankenstein, but it remains an original and monumentally inventive piece of work by a writer still in his 20s. Barnes seems to leave himself room for a sequel—a consummation devoutly to be wished.

12. The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson. From the Synopsis:

Of immense imaginary and emotional scope, The Stone Gods is Jeanette Winterson at her prescient, playful, muscular best. An interplanetary love story, a traveller’s tale, a hymn to the beauty of the world, this is a novel that will change forever the stories we tell about the earth, about love and about stories themselves.

13. A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz. From “Publishers Weekly”:

A Voyage Long and Strange is a history-fueled, self-imposed mission of rediscovery, a travelogue that sets out to explore the surprisingly long list of explorers who discovered America, and what discovered means anyway, starting with the Vikings in A.D. 1000, and ending up on the Mayflower….

Sigh. Vogue’s closet ain’t got nothing on my book pile.

On the greatest novel of all time, being a naive English major, hating the books you read, loving the books you read, and why you should always pay attention in class:

Any poll that has The Da Vinci Code as the fifth greatest novel of all time is, frankly, null and void in my book - I don’t care what’s at the top of the list.

Besides, I stopped trusting those “greatest book lists/polls” a long time ago. Once, way back yonder, I got my hands on one of those “100 greatest books” lists. As I remember it, the list supposedly laid out the 100 greatest books ever written by American and British authors. It was given to me by my freshman English lit. professor, who asked as he handed it out, “Who can tell me what’s wrong with this list?”

I wasn’t listening. I was too busy circling all of the books that I’d read, and underlining those I’d at least heard of. The number was depressingly small. The combined number didn’t cover even half of the list. Added to that, the books that I hadn’t circled or underlined were so obscure, their titles so boring that I wasn’t sure that if given the chance I wanted to read them anyway.

But I was a newly-minted, excited and fairly naive English student. I was only a few months removed from the girl who, when she learned she’d been accepted to an English program went to the nearest bookstore and bought Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy. Why? Because it was the kind of novel I thought English majors would read. Though funny at times, I found it terribly exhausting and by the time I finished it I wasn’t sure if I liked it all. But that’s what English students did, I thought. They read exhausting, difficult books - not the books typically found on the bestseller lists or the romance and horror novels which had been my bread and butter though high school.

So, I was ready. I was ready to tackle the entire list from beginning to end. I would be the most well-read English student the world had ever seen. To be clear, this wasn’t about overachieving so much as it was about feeling that, having come from a poor family and gone to a poor school, I had a lot to make up for. I suspected that my fellow classmates had surely gone to better schools and had already read the great classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I, on the other hand, had been lucky to make it out having read at least Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet.

Over the next few months I hunted through used bookstores and loaded my library with the likes of Babbitt, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, and A Brave New World. I suffered through many uninteresting “great” books as a result. A few of them I liked - A Brave New World had me thinking for days - but the majority of them left me cold. The Sun Also Rises - meh. The Great Gatsby - another, meh. I was beginning to think I was a poor English student.

Then one day as I was pouring over the list trying to decide upon a title I might actually enjoy, I finally saw what was wrong with the list. I began asking myself some very important questions. Who decided on this list? Where are the women on this list? Where are the minorities on this list? Exactly what makes these books so much more important than any other book? Why should I care, really?

The answers to those questions have been hashed and re-hashed again. Needless to say, I learned a valuable lesson - that all reading lists, from “100 greatest books” lists to “the best summer reads” lists should be taken with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, it’s all subjective. Some opinions may be more educated than others, but that doesn’t make them any more than opinions. You don’t have to like or even read a book because someone else says it’s great. Why waste your short reading life on books you probably won’t like just because you think you have to? That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention in class.