So Many Books... The Catch-Up Edition

I haven't asked you to suffer through yet another reading slump, or the writing-about-what-I've-read slump, either. Aren't you grateful?

But I haven't been not reading. And here's proof times three.

Full disclosure here: Marlin (known to his friends as Bart) and I have known each other for years, and we met when he joined the staff of the bookstore shortly after I did. He's gone on to much bigger and better things, of course, so I can honestly say I knew him when. He teaches creative writing at a local Youth Facility as well as in the Low-Residency MFA  program at Converse College. He's won so many awards for his writing that I think he might even have lost count.

So why haven't I ever written about him here? That's simple. I have this thing about reading anything people I know have written, and yes, I know how dreadful that sounds. What I have typically discovered is that I cannot divorce my friend's voice from my friend's character's voices. That has almost always meant that I was a harsher critic than was fair.

There's also this: I typed manuscripts for Bart back in his early writing career, and had to put aside my reading instinct and just type words on a page. When those books were published, I couldn't read them because I had sweated through every revision, every rewrite, every "take this adjective out.... no, put that adjective back in" and I knew I'd be bringing those memories with me. (It was an invaluable experience, though. I envy his writing students, but I sure learned a lot about the craft just from working for him in this way.)

I decided I was going to get over myself, though, and I decided to read his most recent collection Pasture Art, although as a rule I gravitate away from short stories. But here's my bottom line: Marlin Barton is such a meticulous artist, reading these stories was like walking through a museum: some pieces stirred my heart; some had me shaking my head; and some I'd go back and visit over and over again fully expecting to find something new each time. One of them,  Into Silence, is one that I'd rank with the finest short stories I've ever read.

I had allowed myself plenty of time with Pasture Art, and was in the mood for a guaranteed quick read. I picked up Lee Child's Never Go Back. I have never read a Lee Child book that didn't entertain, and it had been a long time since I had spent any time with Jack Reacher.

In this instance, however, I should have let the title be more instructive. I'm just going to give you a minute to figure out what I thought of it. 

After that fiasco, I opted to stay away from sure things. My interest was piqued by a review of Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days. I'd never heard of her, liked the quirky set up, and was hoping I'd discover a true gem. 

Peggy is 8 years old when her father James, a survivalist, leaves her mother and takes Peggy deep into the wilderness. When the idea that this is a great adventure has begun to wear thin, Peggy presses her father to take her home, and it is then he tells her that everyone in the world is dead, save them. Years pass, endless days of scrambling to survive, learning on the job, as it were, how not to die when you have no provisions. In time, however, she is found and reunited with her mother, and it is only then her ordeal assumes the gravitas it has deserved all along. 

Fuller interweaves the wilderness and reintroduction narratives to great effect, and I found myself wanting to protect Peggy in both her lives. 

Our Endless Numbered Days didn't blow me away, but I'm awfully glad to have read it. 

The Fifth Gospel - Ian Caldwell

You'll likely hear Brown's name evoked over and over in reviews of Ian Caldwell's new novel, but I have never read a Dan Brown novel, so I can't make any comparison. As a rule, I'm not terribly interested in speculative fiction. I do understand the appeal, though, so for those who do have fun running down the what-if rabbit holes, here's one for you.

The Fifth Gospel is ultimately, a legal thriller, albeit one that features the legal processes of the Catholic Church, and it provides a fascinating fictional glimpse into the inner workings of that institution. Artist Ugolino Nogara has spent years designing an exhibit which puports to answer, once and for all, the lingering question about the origins and authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. His exhibit relies on his study of the Diatessaron, the harmonic Gospel written in the 11th Century which sought to reconcile inconsistencies in the four traditional Gospels.

It is believed that Nogara's exhibit will have deeply resonating repercussions for the Roman Catholic Church, particularly as regards its historically uneasy relationship with the Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox communities. The push and pull of these earliest Christian bodies of faith is made manifest here in the persons of brothers Simon (a Roman Catholic priest) and Alex (a Greek Catholic priest), who both served as mentors and friends to Nogara.

When Nogara is found dead before the exhibit can see light of day and a key piece of the exhibit is found to be missing, the quest to answer multiple mysteries begins. Who killed him? Where is the missing page of the Diatessaron? What is the true source of the Shroud?

I found all the church history to be very interesting, and while I am sure liberties were taken with some of the depictions of the inner workings of the Vatican, all of that held me in thrall as well. I found the denouement lacking, however, but expect that others may not find it so. All in all, a chewy good read.

On Sale Date:  March 3, 2015

My Sunshine Away -- M.O. Walsh

 

"The narrator of My Sunshine Away tells the riveting story of the summer of 1989, when he was a fourteen-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in love with the girl across the street, Lindy Simpson. Lindy was the girl with the golden hair and perfect legs, who rode her bicycle to track practice every afternoon, leaving a trail of beguiled boys in her wake. Yet one late-summer eve, a crime shattered everyone's illusion of the supposed idyllic neighborhood, and nothing was ever the same again."     -- taken from the book cover

Glowing reviews for this book are popping up everywhere, like a literary whack-a-mole. Everything about this book just screamed: READ ME, and I did, and I must say....

Well.

It was very readable. There were so many beautifully written passages, very compelling story lines that made up the whole, and well-drawn characters. All of those elements tend to earn raves from me, I know. 

The narrator, never named (which always irritates me), is one of those guys you get stuck with at a party; the one who has interesting stories to tell, but who can't resist the urge to go off on tangents in order to lay background or create a setting for what he's really trying to tell you. It's not that his stories weren't well told. It's that his stories so constantly interrupt the flow of the story that it was easy to be pulled off track. I can quibble about that: I am frequently "that guy," I know. 

Of particular note, for instance, is the narrator's sharing of the history of the nutria, a large rodent that was imported to the United States by the folks who make Tabasco sauce. So, yeah, that kind of off-the-rails thing. 

This was a good read that fell short of being a great read for me. 

The Boys in the Boat -- Daniel James Brown

I don't read a great deal of non-fiction. I don't say that to imply that it's a good thing, and it tends to happen that when I do read a work of such it works out that I end up really enjoying whatever it was I chose. Maybe that's simply a function of how discriminating I am when I do venture into the room at the store where the true stuff lives.

I'm happy to report that, although I was late to this particular party, I'm no less enthusiastic about The Boys in the Boat than I would have been if I'd been the one to discover it straight away. One of the dirty little secrets of bookselling is that we read a whole lot about books, and sometimes that is the only basis we have for recommending them to our customers. We can't read everything, sad to say. I knew this one had all the right stuff, just based on early reviews and a few paragraphs here and there that I scanned during quiet times at the shop. More than one person to whom I recommended it highly made a point of tracking me down (at the grocery, at church, etc.) to tell me how very right I had gotten it.

I decided to make it my first read of 2015. I started it a few days before the turn of the calendar, but don't let how long it took me to finish it dissuade you. There was more than one reason that everything slowed down for me as December turned to January, and it took some doing to stay interested in anything. I credit Brown and the remarkable story of achievement in the face of tremendous odds against success for pulling me back to this tale every day.

The Boys in the Boat tells the story of an improbable group of working class young men who rowed for the University of Washington, and who set about to become part of the US Rowing Team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In order to do so, they had to knock off East Coast teams that were considered to have a lock on the sport by dint of tradition. The uphill battle that was paled in comparison to what would face them in Germany. The stakes could not have been much higher, but this group of American sports heroes seemed to thrive on the idea of impossibility.

There is much to learn here about the Nazi propaganda machine, and the role the Olympics played in advancing Hitler's plans. Brown does a wonderful job of juxtaposing the hard work the men of Washington were putting in to their dreams with the devastatingly remarkable job the Nazis were doing of making the world see only what they wanted the world to see.

I'm sorry it took me so long to read this book, but you know what I always say: every book you've not yet read is a new book.

Visitation Street -- Amy Pochoda

I'm just going to squeeze in ONE more micro-review here, for a book that my boss has been raving about for months. I've had it on my list, but as we have a small staff it behooves us not to read the same things all the time. Sometimes this means that one of the other of us never does get around to reading some really solid books, unfortunately.

I made room and time for this one, here at the tail end of the year, and I'm awfully glad I did.

Two young girls take a raft out on the river one night, and only one comes back. While not a traditional mystery (there's no crime being investigated), there are questions about what happened out there on the water that float over the surface of the deeper stories that arise from the denizens of Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood.

Cree is a young man haunted by the murder of his father. He finds a champion in a mysterious tag artist, Ren, who protects and encourages him. Fadi is the owner of a neighborhood bodega who tries to unite the neighborhood in the aftermath of the tragedy. Jonathan is a washed-up musician living on the fumes of past fame, now a teacher and rescuer of Val, the girl who came back from that ill-fated night on the raft, a role that leaves him feeling responsible for her well-being well after that night.

Although I've never been to Red Hook, there are neighborhoods much like this all over the country, place that leave even those who pass through casually with a sense of resignation and hopelessness. Even so, Pochoda's characters are so well-drawn that even those who are less than likable kept me interested in where their own story would wind up.

Strongly recommended.

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Click here for my premiere audiovisual review if you are too lazy to read, bless your heart.

I have held back on writing a review of this one for weeks and weeks, both because I was beginning to get holiday busy at work and because I couldn't figure out how to review it and not spoil the stew out of it in any way, shape, or form. I hate it when that happens. I will never do that to you, I promise.


There is a creeper Girl on the Train who makes it a habit to follow the lives of people she sees from her vantage point on her daily commute, all of whom are just minding their own business in their own homes which are unfortunately situated within viewing distance from the train tracks. Over time, she has become all wrapped up in the stories she has created for them in her increasingly muddled psyche.


She reminded me very much of myself. Well, absent the train, and a bit shy of her level of creepy.  I don't really spy on people, but I love people-watching and I do frequently pass time by writing short stories in my head about why the people I see are where they are when I see them, especially if they are doing something untoward, like the man I saw hanging out of his car at Publix a couple weeks ago. He was obviously very unwell, and his companion/wife/whatever had left him in the car with the door open. I was in the store for about a half hour, and when I returned to my car he was still there and now I was pretty sure he wasn't breathing anymore and his companion/wife/whatever wasn't yet back to the car so I'm certain she must have put arsenic in his food and was slowly, slowly, slowly making her way through the aisles of the grocery to give it time to do its thing so she could feign horror and deep grief and take to carryin' on in public when she got back to the parking lot and discovered him there, lifeless. Ambulances and law enforcement would be called, and the whole thing would cast Publix as an undeserving backdrop for a tawdry, ill-fated romance's deadly conclusion.

Or maybe he was just really sick and she was hung up at the pharmacy window filling a prescription, and they wound up getting home just fine and he felt all better, and the rest of the evening was spent watching reruns of some sub-tier TV series that everybody else watched 6 years ago but which they've just now figured out how to stream.

But I digress.

The Girl on the Train won't be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize or anything, but great googly-moogly, it was as malevolently addictive as Gone Girl.


Publication Date:  January 13, 2015

The Book of Strange New Things -- Michel Faber

I've just recently read a book I can't believe I even picked up. I've been trying to write a review that would capture how very moved and challenged I was by it, but have come to discover how pathetically inadequate I am to do it justice. I am haunted by it, though, and despite being halfway through another really good book I find my mind and heart wandering back to The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber so often that I can scarce pay attention to its replacement in my hand.

I've given up trying to be coherent about this genre-defying story so I'm taking the easy way out. I hope that you will get some sense of how much I want you to read this from the scattershot words that follow. 

Here's the very least you need to know, which I have lifted straight from the publisher's description of it.

It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC.   His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling.  Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter.

As I have been handselling this one, I have made note of the words I'm using in that setting, the questions that people naturally have of me regarding it, and the thoughts about it that keep running through my head and I'm sharing those sentiments with you. 

1.  "Oh, I never read science fiction."  Neither do I, and it doesn't matter. Once you accept the premise--that intergalactic space travel and colonization on a distant planet is the norm--that's really all you have to "get over."

2.  Why set this on another planet?  Maybe because in our day and age it's impossible to find a place on Earth where a person, separated from his wife to take a job, would be utterly unable to communicate in real time with her, to undertake independent plans to return home to her in a crisis, or to have any idea what might be going on in a world left behind outside the context of Peter's one-to-one, sporadic communiques with Bea. 

3.  More than once I thought about times in my own marriage when my husband and I seemed to be doing little more than orbiting each other, and there was something about how Bea and Peter experienced this same thing--a hundredfold, and more literally--that spoke to those emotional memories like few books ever have.

4.  There are some things that remain unexplained, some things that the end of the book left hanging. Since Faber says he will not be writing another book at all, we can be quite certain there will be no sequel providing any answers. The whole book is a journey into the unknown and unknowable for Peter. For that reason, the journey we find ourselves on with him at the book's conclusion is an authentic experience for the invested reader.

5.  No, this is not a book where a person of faith turns out to be the bad guy. (Seriously, this happens so often in fiction that even I tend to shy away from books with ministers of the Gospel as main characters.)

6.  No, it is not a "Christian" book. That said, Faber is respectful of Peter's faith and plies it with credible opportunities for challenge, and growth, and reflection.

7. No, I haven't seen Intergalactic. I have no idea if there are shades of this story in that one, but surely there must be some Big Questions they have in common.

8.  Yes, I think this would make an outstanding book club read. 

There are far more thorough reviews of this book you can find easily, some of which reference other novels as having broken this same ground.  I don't doubt that's true, but you know what?  I haven't read those books, so that doesn't matter to me. (After all, there really are only about six stories in our universe, all of which are rewritten over and over.) The telling thing is that even when the occasional reviewer is finding fault with it for that reason, there is still deep admiration for the elegance and subtlety of Faber's writing. 

The Book of Strange New Things is, in short, a frightfully good read. Please make room for it on your bookshelf.