Warm Glowing Warming Glow

Bites

Twilight, Stephenie Meyer.  OK, when I heard about this book -- high school vampires, star-crossed love, Mormon author -- I pretty much crapped my pants. How could that not be great?

So. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I hated this book. It's too long by about a third. It's oddly fussy in its details -- long passages about seatbelts and driftwood -- while surprisingly flat in characterization. Meyer also seems to take a pass when it comes to describing the few big action sequences (a car crash, a near-rape, a vampire attack) she gives us. Even the gushy romantic stuff that's the center of the book, the stuff you would think -- given Meyer's legion of fans -- is either oddly mechanical or completely glossed over.

Teenage, Wasteland

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow. I think this is going to be a huge book. Obviously, young adult literature is where it's at right now, in terms of big sales. I think that this could be a big school book, too, though, something that winds up in a lot of classrooms and summer reading lists.

Doctorow of course is a pretty famous thinker about technology and civil liberties, and so it's not surprising that he's found an effective way of tying that to his career as a science fiction writer. It's hard to spot even a single mis-step with this book. Pacing is excellent -- even when he has to step back from the story to explain some bit of techno ephemera, he never lost me. He maybe pulls his punches a little bit at the end, but I'm not sure how else he could have ended the book. Oh, and he maybe name-checks his organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a little hard. There are two separate passages -- one pretty long -- singing the praises of EFF, which . . . fine. I'm a fan of them. I get it. But considering that the book ends with an extensive annotated bibliography including another long reference to EFF?

Whatever. These are small quibbles. Read this book. Find some young person to give it to.

Take My Camel

The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay. Another pretty book from our friends at NYRB. This is also the third or fourth in a row that's actually lived up to its book design. Um, this photo doesn't do this book justice, though: the blue of my copy is much nicer.

Anyway . . . This is a very British sort of funny novel. The narrator is traveling in Turkey in the 1950s with her or his (about this more later) aunt and an Anglican priest named Father Chantry-Pigg. Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg want to introduce the Church of England to Turkey, but keep running afoul of imams and Billy Graham (no, really), as well as fellow Brits, all trying to write books about Turkey. Meanwhile, Laurie, the narrator, is struggling with a broken heart.

I'm cribbing a little bit from Jan Morris's introduction when I point out that one of the things that makes the book really work is the sadness under the humor. Morris sees Laurie as female and her relationship with her married lover, Vere, as heavily autobiographical. I see Laurie as pretty ambiguously-gendered. There's really nothing in the text specifically referring to Laurie as a woman and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that he is in fact a man.

Best. Kidnapping. Ever

A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes. It's safe to say that we consume culture for any number of reasons, and it might be interesting at some point to map that somehow. For instance, Gilmore Girls might look like this: good cry + fashion + cultural capital + funny. Jens Lekman is funny + dance to it + Euro. Or something. The problem with this kind of map is that it's so subjective.

Anyway, this book taught me something about what I want from culture: and it turns out that I really, really enjoy being appalled. I'm not kidding. This is the best and most appalling thing I've read since . . . since . . . I think it's that horrifying The Book of Lost Things, the odd, disturbing fairytale pastiche I read last summer. Like that book, A High Wind in Jamaica is about children in serious trouble. This novel also has bad things happening to animals, weird sex, and a series of increasingly startling and puzzling deaths.

One of the problems with reading a book like this is trying to figure out with whom you could really share it. Something like Me Talk Pretty One Day or The Fountain Overflows or A Simple Plan, you know that everyone you've ever met is going to like that. Something as crazy as A High Wind in Jamaica is harder to sell, and maybe more precious because of that. It makes me think of the first time I read The Monk and thinking, "This shit is exactly the kind of crazy Jenny would eat up," or the few people we've made watch Center Stage or The Day After Tomorrow who really got them: most people don't appreciate how something that bananas can be art, and it's exciting when you connect with those people.

Can't Look/Can't Look Away

The Shotgun Rule and Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Charlie Huston. More book reviews, because there's not much on television lately (although The Mole returns tonight). Again, I can't help feeling that Charlie Huston should be a bigger bestseller than he is. His books are incredibly readable and compelling. I'm guessing he's getting rich off the movie rights? I haven't seen anything about plans to film his books, but I wouldn't be surprised. People are always making movies from Elmore Leonard's books, and Charlie Huston's writing is very similar.

The Shotgun Rule is a stretch, for Huston, in terms of narrative voice. All of his previous novels have used a first-person narration. The Shotgun Rule uses a floating third-person limited omniscient, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. It's clear that he has a better handle on some characters than others, and sometimes makes the mistake of dumping too much into his narration. The narration works best when he's using it to tease the reader by describing a scene from different perspectives. As with all of Huston's other books, it's super-violent.


Half the Blood of Brooklyn is the third volume in Huston's noir vampire series. No, I know. Embarrassing. Huston manages to mate the two genres effectively, though. The irreverent gumshoe patter draws away from the mystical vampire hokum while the supernatural elements add a fresh element to the hard-boiled tropes.

Reading this book taught me something about noir, actually: I think it's actually a terribly masochistic genre -- think about Philip Marlow and Sam Spade taking all those conks to the head, or what Roman Polanski does to Jack Nicholson's face in Chinatown. All of the regeneration that goes on with Huston's vampire characters makes the injuries almost laughable.

The Great-ish American Novel

The Darling, Russell Banks. Remember Fametracker? Remember the Fame Audit? The idea was that the Fametracker correspondents would analyze a celebrity to determine whether he or she was famous enough, too famous or just right. Reading Russell Banks generally makes me think of that: is Russell Banks the greatest living American novelist? And if so, have enough people heard of him? Too many? The right number of people? I can think of at least two of his novels (Continental Drift and The Sweet Hereafter) that made me think, "This is it. This is exactly the book" about something and one (Rule of the Bone) that just seemed impossibly clever. But I don't see people reading his books on the subway, I never read them as an undergraduate English major, and except for the brief spate of film adaptations about 10 years ago, I don't hear anyone talking about him.

The Darling is not my favorite of Banks's novels. It's not bad, it doesn't cause me to question the hyperbolic statements of the paragraph above. If anything, the faint disappointment I felt while reading it reinforced my appreciation for Banks's other books. Furthermore, while trying to determine what exactly I found disappointing about the book, I came across all sorts of things Banks does surprisingly well. For instance, he pulls off the trick of narrating in the voice of a person of the opposite sex, something many novelists really can't do. There's just something a little bit off in how the story is doled out -- it feels stingy, somehow -- he teases out the outline of the plot in the first 20 pages, then spends something like 400 more building up to a climactic few pages. It may have been a mistake to have read this book immediately after What Is the What: that book covered almost the same ground as The Darling (same continent, different country, different region, similar ideology), but in a much more immediate, personal way. Usually, Banks is an author who can marry ethical and political concerns with real narrative urgency, and in this book -- and really, maybe just in comparison to What Is the What -- he feels a little removed.

The Bureau of Good and Evil

Night Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko. This seems to me stereotypically Russian: one half fairytale, one half bureaucracy. You see, there are the forces of Good (the Light Ones) and there are the forces of Evil (the Dark Ones) and they're locked in an epic struggle. Exciting, right? Well, kind of. It turns out that there's a centuries-old truce between Light and Dark, and this is really the story of the Night Watch, the Light Ones in charge of enforcing the truce. (There's also a Day Watch consisting of the Night Watch's opposite number among the Dark Ones.)

I go back and forth about this book and its sequel, Day Watch, which I'm reading right now. On the one hand, reading about treaties, it turns out, is pretty unexciting (unless we're talking about the s!@# that went down at Yalta, of course). Plus the books' episodic structure tends to draw suspense away. But what the books have going for them is Lukyanenko's psychological and philosophical insight. The central, seemingly doomed love story between IT guy/magician Anton and Svetlana, the much more powerful witch he loves is worth all the talk about "fifth level infractions" and the rest of it. -- Pete

Lost Youth

What Is the What, Dave Eggers. I feel a little weird writing about this book at all, and in fact, wasn't going to, just because we (that is, Jenny) know and work with the author. The subject matter, furthermore, is so serious and the format is so unfamiliar to me, that I feel ill-equipped to evaluate the book. Anyway, as you probably know, Eggers worked with Valentino Achak Deng, a Lost Boy of Sudan now living in Atlanta, and produced What Is the What, which is described as both a novel and as Deng's autobiography. I am having a similar experience to that of reading The Man Who Loved Children: I frequently have to put the book down and pace, because it is so troubling, but I keep reading it because the writing is so beautiful and clear.  -- Peter

Kid Stuff

The Blue Hill Meadows, Cynthia Rylant. Last night, I was babysitting, trying to get my over-sugared (because I'm a dumbass) niece and nephew to go to sleep already, when my niece grabbed this from the pile. I was happy because it looked soporific, but pissed because it was so freaking long. It did the trick, though, and damn if the story didn't stick with me. Who knew Sherwood Anderson wrote bedtime stories?

The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley. Even though I like to think that I'm not one of those book people (You know, the ones who blather on about the smell and feel of whatever and whatever and books are never going to go away and la la la la I'm going to kill all of you. Maybe those people only exist in library school and you never encounter them out in the real world. Lucky you.), but I do sometimes fall for a really great cover, and New York Review Books get me every single time. This is maybe the first one I've read and actually enjoyed. The Go-Between  is the story of a young boy staying at a country estate in Norfolk. The daughter of the house enlists him to carry messages between her and her illicit lover, with disastrous psycho-sexual-social consequences for all involved. It's sort of like Henry James or Ford Madox Ford, only with many of the subtextual elements a bit less subtextual. There's a movie, too, which I'm almost positive I saw, because it screened at my college, and I remember complaining about it afterwards, but I have no recollection of the film itself.

David Sedaris on Smoking

Another link to The New Yorker (I know!).  This one is David Sedaris writing about smoking.  I haven't read it yet, but I wanted to share.