Vacation Reading

I'm on vacating this week and headed to the beach, so I should have plenty of time for reading. I set aside The World Without Us in favor of books that sounded like more fun: First up is David Benioff's City of Thieves, which I started on the plane. So far it's pretty good--personal and suspenseful. The book starts off with a 34 year-old narrator who travels to Florida to visit his grandparents. He wants to write the life story of his grandfather, who, as a young man, lived in Poland during World War II. When the narrator reviews his notes and finds holes, his grandfather's reply is "you're a writer; make it up!" The book then shifts to the grandfather's perspective as a 17 year-old in Poland...

David Wroblewski

The day after I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I saw the author speak at Politics & Prose and got my book signed. He was very nice, and you could tell how much he loved the novel and what it represented. He grew up in Wisconsin, but not the same area where the book was set, and was proud to have created a novel that speaks for the state. He did extensive research on the town of Mellen, which is near where the Sawtelle farm in located. He told me that the "hot mix duck massacre" depicted in the book, where a flock of ducks died when they dove onto a newly paved road they mistook for water, is based on a real incident he came across during this research. He spent a lot of time with each participant afterwards and signed the books generously (the last author I saw at P&P zipped through the line as fast as possible).

David described the book as "a boy and his dog story for grownups," drawing inspiration from sources like Call of the Wild. A key theme in the book is the interplay between the wild and the domestic and how these ideas aren't as distinct as we imagine. This plays out with the dogs explicitly, but also the environment, which, being quite rural, feels like the "edge" of human settlement.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

I finished reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle this week. I loved the book--one of the best I've read this year. The novel was thoroughly engrossing, and despite its length--562 pages--I got through it in under 2 weeks. The world depicted in the book, rural 1970s Wisconsin, was fully realized, with vivid imagery and detail. I felt "immersed" in the story, even more so in certain scenes, like where Trudy, Edgar's mother, is training him to train the dogs. Other standout passages include tornadoes coming off of Lake Superior, a burning barn, and Edgar's friendship with a man he encounters while on the run. Edgar himself is a wonderful character--intelligent, willful, observant, and very communicative, despite being mute.

Here's a big confession: I'm not a dog person, but after reading this book, I feel like I understand dogs a little better, and therefore might be a little more interested in them. No promises.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

With Inheritance of Loss aside, I felt free to pick up this book, which I just got this week. Reviews for this have been glowing--among the best reviewed books of the year so far. I'm 50 pages in, and I really like it. I think it has the potential to be a genre-crossing book, like The Kite Runner was. While it's mostly a family drama, I think there's some thriller potential. The prologue, which so far is completely disconnected from the main narrative, involved a shady character obcuring a very lethal poison in Pusan, Korea. The story itself is about the Sawtelle family, so far just setting up Edgar, his parents, his grandfather, and his dog.

Inheritance of Loss

Last week I did something I rarely do: I put a book down. After 120 pages--a pretty fair shot I think--I just wasn't into this book. I thought it was interesting: I liked reading about life in rural India--but I wasn't feeling much connection with the characters, especially the younger ones. I may pick it up again, but there are other books I'm more interested in at the moment.

Love Is a Mix Tape

I finished Love Is a Mix Tape. I really enjoyed it. I thought the author effectively used the music he and his wife liked to help enhance the story. I wish the book had been a little longer. I felt like we didn't get to know Renee very well--perhaps he felt that way too.

Love Is a Mix Tape

I'm almost done with Love Is a Mix Tape. I've been enjoying it. I felt compelled to buy and listen to Nirvana's In Utero yesterday after Rob described it has better than Nevermind because it reminded him of what he was going through as a husband. And then I got to the section where his wife dies unexpectedly, which is heartbreaking. I think he captured well the pure shock of what happened.

Love Is a Mix Tape

Friday I started reading Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. This is Sheffield's memoir, about his life in general, but mostly his relationship with his wife Renee, who died unexpectedly in 1997 after they'd been together only 8 years. So far the tone is fun and upbeat, although surely it will be taking a darker turn later. Each chapter starts with the playlist of a mix tape he or Renee made and recalls that time of his life, frequently with references to the songs on the tape. If you are a music fan, and particularly a mix tape maker (and clearly, given that this is my other blog, I assure you I was), then this aspect of the story should appeal to you. I had boxes of mixes when I was a kid, which later became mix CDs, and now recently iTunes playlists.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I just read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The book was this year's Pulitzer fiction winner. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book starts by introducing the title character Oscar de Leon ("Oscar Wao" was a nickname he picked up, a reworking of "Oscar Wild'). Oscar was a very nerdy kid--overweight, into science fiction, very into girls but so awkward around them. From there the book works backwards, telling the stories of all of Oscar's family, including his sister, mother and grandfather. I didn't expect this, and I liked it quite a bit, for the narrative unfolds as a history of an immigrant family's past. Once a great family in the Dominican Trujillo dictatorship, the family suffered quite a fall, theorized as the result of a curse--or fuku--placed on the family. The narrator at first seems like third person, although we later learn he is Oscar's college roommate and his sister's boyfriend. There is one deviation of this though--the sister gets to tell her story from first person, which is interesting. Reflecting back it's like the author wanted us to know that the boyfriend didn't ever know her well enough to tell her story, which is fitting.

The book has a lot of Spanish in it, particularly for the profanity and sexual descriptions (of which there is quite a bit). There are numerous footnotes, most of which serve to fill in factual details of Dominican culture and history--through the narrator's very opinionated viewpoint of course. Science fiction/fantasy references abound, particularly to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Trek. Here's a great line from one footnote, the components of which you may or may not recognize depending on your Sci-Fi/Fantasy lit: "Outer Azua is one of the pporest areas in the DR....the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine." The only ones I got were the last two--Star Trek II, and Star Wars.

(Spoiler, maybe) The ending gets a bit tedious. Given the title and the cover picture, I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that Oscar is destined to meet his maker early. The process of getting us there--once it's obvious how it will happen--involves Oscar stalking an old Dominican prostitute he's fallen in love with, who happens to be married to a mean-tempered policeman. Yikes.

Lush Life

I finished Lush Life. While I enjoyed it, I was a bit disappointed, only because I liked Samaritan so much. Where this book suffers was in doing too much. Samaritan was a much simpler story and was better for it. It focused on two interesting and compelling main characters. Lush Life had about six main characters: the lead cop, his partner, the victim's coworker/key witness, the victim's father, the victim's father's wife, the perpetrator, and a roving band of "quality of life" cops. Particularly near the end, Price keeps jumping between all these various elements, sometimes with unnecessary detours. One of the main characters, a youngish restaurant manager who was the victim's supervisor (the victim was the bartender) and was with him when he was killed, wasn't very interesting. He just seemed like a real jerk; taking advantage of his mentor-type boss to try to deal coke in the restaurant while sleeping with one of the waitresses he cares nothing about. He also holds up the investigation after being wrongly accused of the crime (his gut-wrenching initial interrogation is very well written, perhaps the book's best moment). I really liked the main cop's Latina female partner. She came from a poor neighborhood and worked her way out of it. She therefore has more empathy (not necessarily sympathy) for the denizens of the communities in which they generally work. I wish she'd had more time in the book.

Sorry

I didn't mean to neglect this blog. I'll make up for it right now.

Lush Life

I'm about three quarters through Richard Price's Lush Life. I like it, although I don't think it's as good as his last novel, Samaritan. That book focused mainly on the central character, Ray, and the female cop, Nerese, who was was investigating his assault. I thought both of those characters were very well drawn. By contrast, Lush Life has about six or seven main characters, plus several other supporting ones, and the book jumps around a lot. Ray was the "victim" from Samaritan, and I felt like he was a likeable, relatable guy. Eric, the equivalent "victim" in Lush Life (he's not really the victim, but is close enough, since the victim is dead and he was there when it happened) is kind of a jerk, not at all likable. There's two main cops, plus a whole bunch of other ones, including a "quality of life" squad that seems to exist mostly for comic relief. The story is engaging though, and I'm curious how it will all unfold.

Late Nights on Air

I finished Late Nights on Air last week. The last third of the book took a rather unexpected departure--four of the characters went on a 6-week hiking and canoeing trip. As much as I found myself wanting to learn about Yellowknife--the setting of the first two-thirds of the book, Elizabeth Hays' descriptions of the vast, unpopulated wilderness of the Northwestern Territories was quite beautiful. The very end of the book was a little odd, but overall I found this book to be very readable and compelling. On to Richard Price's Lush Life.

Late Nights on Air

Right now I'm reading Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. It was all over bookstores when we were in Canada in October, and it won the Giller Prize in November (Canada's big literary prize). It took me awhile to get into it, but now I really like it. It's set in mid 1970s Yellowknife, Canada, the largest city (about 10,000) in Canada's sparsely populated Northwest Territories. The story centers on about five main characters that work in a public radio station, most of whom are transplants from more populated areas of southern Canada, such as Toronto. I like the characters, especially Gwen and Dido, two young female characters who find themselves at odds, but really have quite a bit in common. I also like the political subplot about an energy company wanting to build a gas pipeline through the area that's intensifying racial tensions between the native populations and the mostly white newcomers to the area. I'm about halfway through, and the long dark winter has just set in.

Richard Price at Politics and Prose

I saw Richard Price at Politics & Prose last night. He read from his recent book, Lush Life, which I got for my birthday, but haven't read yet. I loved his last novel, Samaritan, which Entertainment Weekly named their favorite fiction book of 2003.

The author was quite engaging, with a very New York sense of humor. Price grew up in the Bronx, and talked about how when he went upstate for college at Cornell, he intentionally emphasized his Bronx accent as an identity thing. Later, at a book signing in New York City for his first novel, a construction worker-type approached him about his accent, saying that his daughter attended a local college and spoke "better fuckin' English" than he did.

He also talked about writing, specifically the fallacy that a lot of writers fall into where they feel like they can only write about things they've personally experienced. "It's fiction! You can make it up!" he said, and following a period of screenwriting, felt more free to more exploratory in his writing.

Introduction

I decided to launch a new blog in honor of my other great love (besides popular music and my partner)--reading. For the last two and a half years I've enjoyed writing a popular music blog, http://wwadh.blogspot.com/, which will continue, but I wanted an outlet to write about books. My taste is mostly for contemporary fiction, with the occasional foray into genre fiction (science fiction, mystery, crime fiction), older fiction (including classics), or non-fiction. I intend to write about what I'm reading, what I've read, and what I want to read, as well as any author sightings (I'm lucky to live just 3 blocks from a well-known local bookstore that features a different visiting author practically every night). So without further adieu...onward.